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INQUIRIES AND SUGGESTIONS 



IN REGAKD TO 



THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 



WORD OF GOD 



BY 



ALBERT BARNES. 



"Long before positive laws were instituted, the moral relations 
of justice were absolute and universal. To say that there was 
no justice or injustice but that which depends on the injunctions 
or prohibitions of positive laws, is to say that the radii which 
spring from a centre are not equal till we'have formed a circle to 
illustrate the proposition." — MfljiXBsafiiEiT. 




PHILADELPHIA: 
PARRY AND M C MILLAN 

1859. 



Note. — In this Essay, the question about the actual evidences of 
a revelation is not discussed, nor is the inquiry started as to what 
would be proper external evidences of a revelation from God. My 
object did not lead me to inquire into that subject, but it has been 
rather to prepare the way for a proper appreciation of those evi- 
dences. 




Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1S5S, by 

PARRY AND M C MILLAN, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United 

States for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. 



COLLINS, PRINTER. 



C N T E NTS. 



CHAPTER I. 



MAXIMS, OR SETTLED PRINCIPLES, AS BEARING ON A REVELATION 
FROM GOD. 

PAGE 

Sect. 1. There is such a thing as truth ..... 5 

2. There is that in man which responds to truth, or 

which is a just ground of appeal in regard to truth 7 

3. Truth depends, for its reception by the mind, on its 

being perceived as truth . . . . .10 

4. There is a distinction between right and wrong, and 

this distinction is founded in the nature of things 13 

5. There is that in man which responds to the distinc- 

tion of right and wrong 17 

6. A revelation from God will not contradict any truth, 

however that truth is made known . . .18 

7. A pretended revelation which should contradict es- 

tablished truth, could not be received by mankind 26 

8. A revelation on the same line of subjects will, so far 

as coincident, carry forward the truth already 
known ; not contradict it 28 

9. A revelation will not, in its teachings, be a violation 

of the constitutional principles of our nature . 30 

CHAPTER II. 

APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES IN JUDGING OF A 
REVELATION. 

Sect. 1. Reason as an element in judging of a revelation . 37 

2. The moral sense as an element in judging of a revela- 

tion 44 

3. Science as an element in judging of a revelation . 53 



IV CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER III. 

THE STATEMENTS OF THE BIBLE IN VIEW OP THESE PRINCIPLES. 

PAGE 

Seot. 1. The Bible appeals to the reason of mankind . . 65 

2. The Bible appeals to the conscience, or moral sense, 

of mankind 81 

3. The Bible in relation to the discoveries of science . 109 

a. Geology 119 

b. The unity of the race 132 

CHAPTER IV. 

Conclusion. What is the foundation of faith in the word of 

God? 159 



THE 



Jfoimhtiflit of Jfait| in t\t lEorb ri §A 



CHAPTER I. 



REVELATION FROM GOD. 



§ 1. There is such a thing as truth. 
Truth may be regarded as comprising two things: — 
(a) Truth considered as spoken — stated — represented; 
that is, as exhibited either by words, by signs, by pic- 
tures, or by statuary. In this sense, and as the word 
is commonly employed, truth is the representation of 
things as they are. Thus we say of a painting or a 
poem, that it is " true to nature." A painting, in this 
sense, is true if it is a proper representation of a land- 
scape, a water-fall, an historical scene, or of the human 
countenance. A drama is true if it correctly repre- 
sents human nature, or is a just delineation of the 
passions of men. Astronomical truth is a correct re- 
presentation of the heavenly bodies ; botanical truth, a 
correct representation of plants; geological truth, a 
correct representation of the world before the creation 
of man as disclosed by fossil remains ; historical truth, 
2 



6 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

a correct representation of events as they have 'occurred 
in past ages ; mathematical truth, a correct representa- 
tion of facts in regard to number and quantity; meta- 
physical truth, as the phrase is commonly understood, 
a correct representation of the nature and operations of 
the human mind. In all these, and in all similar cases, 
the essential idea is that of a representation of things as 
they are — not as we might imagine them to be; and not 
as made better by leaving out offensive or incongruous 
parts, but as they actually are. In this respect, it makes 
no difference in what mode the representation is made ; 
whether by words, by painting, by sign, by symbol, by 
metaphor, or by plain didactic statement. If the re- 
presentation conveys to the mind a correct idea of 
things as they are, that representation is truth. 

(b) Truth considered as found in the reality of things, 
or in the events and facts which are thus represented, 
or which lie at the basis of the representation. This 
sense of the term is less common than the other, and 
yet it is plain that this idea is included in the full 
notion of truth. In all truth there is not merely a 
representation, but there is a basis for the representa- 
tion, or something on which the representation is 
founded, and to which it must conform. Thus, if the 
statement is made that two and two make four, or that 
all the angles of a triangle are equal to two right 
angles, the statement of these facts is truth as represented, 
but there is truth as the basis, or as the foundation of 
the statement ; or, in other words, it is a fact that two 
and two make four, and that all the angles of a triangle 
are equal to two right angles. These facts or realities 
remain the same whether there is any representation 
of them or not; whether they are known or not; 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 7 

whether they are thought of or not; whether the 
representation be made by words, by signs, or by sym- 
bols — in the language of a vision, or on a blackboard. 
And, moreover, these facts remain the same though 
there should be a false representation of them : for, if 
it should be said that two and two make five, it is still 
a fact that they make but four; if it should be affirmed 
that all the angles of a triangle are equal to three or 
more right angles, it is still a fact that they are equal 
to two ; and this fact will remain the same forever. 

These facts make it certain that there is such a thing 
as truth — truth in the reality of things, or as the basis 
of a representation — and truth as a representation. 
Truth is not arbitrary, fluctuating, vacillating; truth 
is not the subject of creative power ; truth is not capa- 
ble of being changed by mere power: for no power 
could make two and two equal to seven, or the angles 
of a triangle equal to four right angles ; and no power 
could make such a representation conformable to truth. 

It is not needful to inquire how it is that things 
come to be true. All that is affirmed is, that there is 
such a thing as truth, and that this is of such a nature 
that it cannot be changed by mere power or will. 

§ 2. There is that in man which responds to truth, or 
which is a just ground of appeal in regard to truth. 

The human mind is so made as to perceive truth, or 
to receive an impression corresponding to its nature ; 
to be affected by it as truth. It is so constituted that 
an impression is made upon it by truth different from 
the impression made by error. It is so constituted that 
it may be an element of calculation in endeavoring to 
influence others, that they may be, and will be, affected 



8 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

by truth if it is fairly brought before their minds ; so 
constituted that it is fair to presume that there will be 
a uniform result in regard to the same individual, and 
in regard to different individuals, by the proper exhibi- 
tion of truth. In other words, in reference to the same 
individual, so long as personal identity remains, whether 
in childhood, youth, manhood, or old age, and so far 
as the truth produces its appropriate effect in the out- 
ward changes of life, in sickness or health, joy or sor- 
row, prosperity or adversity, ignorance or learning, the 
impression produced by truth is always the same; and 
so far as different individuals are concerned, the im- 
pression is the same on all. Wherever man is found, 
civilized or savage ; whatever language he may speak ; 
under whatever government he may live; whatever 
laws he may obey, or whatever form of philosophy or 
religion he may embrace, so far as truth makes any 
impression, it is always the same impression, for it 
always finds that in the mind which responds to it in 
precisely the same way. This fact, not capable, 
indeed, of demonstration, we always assume as a 
maxim, or as an elementary thought in our endeavors 
to influence others. We have the fullest conviction 
that, to the minds of two boys in a school, the propo- 
sition that two and two make four, conveys precisely 
the same idea, and that it conveys to them exactly the 
same idea which it will when they reach middle life or 
old age. We cannot doubt, also, that it conveys to 
those boys exactly the same idea which it did to New- 
ton, in the maturity of his powers ; or that to an Ameri- 
can savage, to a wandering Bedouin, or to a New Zea- 
lander, it would convey precisely the same impression. 
In like manner, also, although we mav not be able 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 9 

absolutely to demonstrate it, we have the fullest assur- 
ance that the impression or image conveyed to the mind 
by a tree, a landscape, a waterfall, a flower, is exactly 
the same : the same always to the individual mind in 
all its changes ; the same to all minds, whether civil- 
ized or savage. On the same principle, so far as the 
minds of men are enlightened to appreciate truth, the 
same fact occurs in regard to moral truths. That a 
parent should love his child; that a child should vene- 
rate its parent ; that ingratitude is base ; that treachery 
is wrong ; that to do good to others is right — all these, 
and similar propositions, we have every reason to sup- 
pose convey exactly the same idea to every mind. 
We may suppose it possible, indeed, that it might have 
been otherwise; that the eyes of men might have been 
so made that what to one conveys the idea of white 
would have conveyed to another the idea of red, and 
that what to-day seems to us to be yellow might to- 
morrow seem to be green or blue ; that men might have 
been so made that what seems to one to be a triangle, 
might convey to another the idea of a square ; or that 
what now seems to be honorable and virtuous to one, 
might have seemed dishonorable and wicked to another; 
or that, in respect to the same individual, there might 
have been an utter confusion on these subjects at dif- 
ferent periods of life: — but it is evident that, in that case, 
the world could not have moved on at all ; all would 
have been disorder; language would have been useless; 
any communication of ideas from one to another would 
have been impossible; society would have been im- 
practicable; speech, schools, writing, printing, paint- 
ing, statuary, would have been useless, and the world 
would have been a universal, though temporary, Babel, 



10 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

for it would soon have come to an end. We cannot 
advance a step in life without assuming it as a fixed 
principle that there is something in man that responds 
to truth; that this something exists in individual men, 
whatever changes they may undergo, and that it exists 
in the races in all the varieties of complexion, climate, 
language and art. That the basis may be enlarged by 
cultivation, so that new truths and beauties may be 
appreciated, there can be no doubt; but we always 
assume that there {5 a basis, and that if the truth can 
be brought into contact with the mind, it will always 
find something there which will respond to it, and that 
it will always make the same impression. 

§ 3. Truth depends, for its reception by the mind, on its 
being perceived as truth. 

The mind sees or perceives it to be true. The process 
of reasoning conducts to this result, when the truth 
arrived at is the result of reasoning; but the effect of 
the process of reasoning is merely to put the mind in 
such a state as to perceive that the proposition is true. 
When the truth referred to is an axiom, it is perceived 
at once without any medium ; when it is the result of 
a demonstration, the process of the demonstration 
merely puts the mind, in reference to the truth that 
is demonstrated, in the same state in which it is, with- 
out any such process, in reference to an axiom or self- 
evident truth. That the whole is greater than a part ; 
that if equals be added to equals the results will be 
equal, are propositions which commend themselves 
at once, without demonstration, to every mind, but it 
is equally true that the mind perceives with equal clear- 
ness, that in a right-angled triangle the square of the 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 11 

hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of 
the other sides, though this is the result of a demon- 
stration. The process of reasoning in the case has put 
the mind simply into a condition to perceive the truth 
of that proposition ; if it has not done this, it has ac- 
complished nothing. 

In illustration of this, it may be remarked that it is 
possible to conceive that the power of perceiving truth 
as intuitive, or without the aid of reasoning, might 
exist to almost any extent even in created beings, as it 
exists in an absolutely unlimited extent in God. We 
may suppose that there might be, and perhaps actually 
may be now, created intelligences to whom all that is 
now perceived by men of the highest order of intellect 
as the result of the profoundest analysis, may be seen 
to be true at a glance, and may be, in fact, to their 
minds, maxims, or self-evident truths, lying, in their 
investigations, at the foundation of a vastly higher 
method of reasoning than is possible as yet to man, 
and bearing the same relation to a system of truth 
which is not now conceivable by us, which the maxims 
of geometry do to the highest forms of mathematical 
reasoning known among men. It is said of Newton 
that he read the propositions of Euclid as if they were 
maxims or self-evident truths, as being too plain and 
obvious to need demonstration. Even the celebrated 
forty-seventh proposition of the first book he did not 
pause to demonstrate, for he saw at a glance the truth 
of the statement in that proposition. Thus, too, in the 
ordinary occurrences of college life, we see the same 
fact illustrated. One member of a class, endowed with 
superior mathematical talent, sees a proposition to be 
true almost intuitively, while perhaps his fertile mind 



12 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

will suggest half a dozen methods of demonstrating the 
truth of the proposition equally as conclusive as the 
one which is laid down in the book before him ; while 
another shall exhaust all his resources in mastering the 
train of reasoning suggested in the book by which the 
proposition is supported. In either case, however, the 
proposition, if believed, is seen to be true. The mind 
looks directly at the truth of the statement; in the one 
case intuitively, in the other by the aid of that which 
has made one step after another clear, until light has 
broken on the very truth to be demonstrated — as the 
stars of heaven guide the mariner along from point to 
point over the ocean, until, the stars that guided him 
forgotten, he sees with his own eyes the cities and 
hamlets and green fields of the land to which he sails. 
The statement here made is, that the mind perceives 
truth — perceives it as it is. It does not rest on the 
mere reasoning, but on the truth itself as now com- 
mending itself to the mind as true. The mental con- 
ditions which illustrate this are such as these : (a) There 
are simple, elementary truths or maxims which com- 
mend themselves to all minds, even to the minds of 
children, and which lie at the basis of all correct 
reasoning, (b) There is a process of reasoning based 
on those elementary truths, by which we are led to see 
some truth which would not have been plain to our 
minds without such aid. (c) There are some minds, 
like that of Newton, which, in the ordinary demon- 
strations of truth, do not need even such aid, but which 
start where most men leave off, assuming for themselves 
as axioms what to most men would be arrived at only 
as the result of labored reasoning, (d) There may be 
minds to whom the highest discoveries, even of New- 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 13 

ton, would be perceived at once to be axioms or self- 
evident truths, from which they would start off on a 
higher career of reasoning than would be possible for 
any intellect now known to us. (e) And there is the 
mind of God, high above all, to whom all truth is self- 
evident; the mind of One who sees all truth as we 
perceive the simplest axioms of geometry, who never 
reasons, but sees and states things at once as they are. 

§ 4. There is a distinction between right and wrong, and 
this distinction is founded in the nature of things. 

The amount of this remark, which to most minds 
would appear to be self-evident, is, that a thing cannot 
be both right and wrong at the same time; or now right, 
and now wrong, as the result of appointment; or made 
right or wrong by mere will. An object cannot be 
black and white at the same time ; or now white and 
now black, as the result of appointment ; or made 
white or black by mere will. That cannot be made 
right to-day, which, in precisely the same circumstances, 
was wrong yesterday; and that cannot be right for one 
class or order of beings, which, in precisely the same 
circumstances, would be wrong in another. A lie 
cannot be truth, nor the truth falsehood ; honesty 
cannot be fraud, nor fraud honesty ; love cannot be 
hatred, nor hatred love : and as these cannot be trans- 
muted into each other, so by no authority can they, in 
precisely the same circumstances, be made obligatory 
in one case, and prohibited in another. What is true, 
also, in this respect in regard to man, is true in regard 
to God. No one can believe that justice in God depends 
on his mere will, or that it would be proper for him 
to perform any act which he chose, and to call it jus- 



14 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

tice at his pleasure. In like manner, no one can 
believe that truth in God depends on will, or that it 
would be proper for him, as an act of will, to make 
any statement which he chose, and to call it truth; 
or that it would be right to-day to call one utterance 
truth, and to-morrow to call it falsehood. Every man 
is so made as to feel assured, whatever theory he 
may defend that would seem to imply the contrary, 
that God determines to do right because it is right; 
to speak truth because it is truth; to be equal and 
impartial in his administration, because it is right 
and proper that he should be so. And every man is 
so made that he cannot believe the contrary ; or that, 
under any circumstances, it would be proper for God 
to reverse things in such a way that it would be right 
for Him to do what he now denounces and condemns 
as evil, false, and wrong, or that the mere act of his 
doing it would make it right. In no conceivable cir- 
cumstance can the mind of man take in the idea that 
it would be proper for God to give to man a wholly 
false representation of things; to do himself that which 
he has forbidden men to do; or to require of men, as 
an act of virtue, that which he now denounces as 
sinful and wrong. Every idea which we can form of 
the Supreme Being always implies this, that by his 
own eternal nature, he is just, and holy, and true, and 
good ; not that he has made himself to be just by an 
arbitrary act. The mind of man, at all events, has 
been so made that it cannot take in the contrary idea, 
that he could have made the reverse of that which, he 
has declared to be holy, true, good, and just, equally 
holy, true, good, and just; and this fact is a proof, since 
God made that mind, that there is that in the nature 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 15 

of things which is right and true. What is right and 

DO O 

true to day was right and true yesterday, and will be 
forever. 

It is to be admitted, indeed, that there are things 
which are, in themselves, indifferent, and which may 
be, therefore, subjects of command or prohibition. 
Whether one shall, or shall not, eat a certain article 
of food ; whether he shall or shall not spend a portion 
of his time in a certain manner; whether he shall or 
shall not devote a portion of a weekly income to a 
specified use, may properly be the subject of command, 
and may, therefore, be made right or wrong according 
to the command. At the same time, however, in re- 
gard to even these, it can never be a matter of indif- 
ference whether man shall or shall not obey God when 
his will is made known, nor is it possible to conceive 
that it could be made right for him, in respect to these 
things, to disobey Gocl. In the nature of things, 
obedience to the will of God is right ; disobedience is 
and must be wrong. Why this is so will be seen in 
another part of this Essay. 

In reference, also, to those things which are in them- 
selves indifferent, and which may, therefore, be the 
subject of an arbitrary prohibition or command, the 
following principles are plain, and are such as must be 
admitted by all men : — 

(a) Such a command or prohibition will not violate 
any known principle of right. It will not sanction an 
act of injustice, falsehood, or fraud. It will not set 
aside the eternal principles of truth and equity. 

(b) It will violate no law of our nature. It will not 
command a father to hate his children, or children to 
hate a father ; it will not require us to turn away with 



16 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

coldness from the suffering, the oppressed, and the 
sick ; it will not authorize cruelty, treachery, and false- 
hood, for these are unchangeable principles in our 
nature which must have had their origin in God, and 
in his sense of what is right, and no mere act of will 
can change them or set them aside. 

(c) In reference to constituted relations — or relations 
which do not exist in the nature of things — the same 
essential principles must prevail. So far as those re- 
lations are to be regulated by law, the following prin- 
ciples must and will be found in all acts of a correct 
legislation. (1.) The legislation will be according to 
the design of the relation, or the object which was 
contemplated in constituting the relation. (2.) It will 
be in accordance with settled and established principles 
of justice and right. That will not be made right in 
this relation, which is wrong elsewhere. 

(d) The legislation will be that which is best adapted 
to secure the object of the relation. 

There are numerous relations constituted which do 
not exist in the nature of things, or by any absolute 
necessity of nature. Yet in these relations, wrong 
will not be made right, or right made wrong ; good 
will not be made evil, or evil made good. 

§ 5. There is that in man which responds to the distinc- 
tion of right and wrong. 

This proposition is almost too plain to admit even 
of illustration. All men instinctively act on it in 
their treatment of others ; all legislators assume it to 
be true ; all parents regard it as indisputable in their 
treatment of their children ; all authors who write on 
the subject of morals take it for granted ; and all 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 17 

preachers of the Gospel make it the ground of their 
most solemn appeals and most earnest exhortations. 
As we always assume it to be true that men can be 
reasoned with, and can be made to see the force of 
argument; that a landscape will appear beautiful to 
the eye, and that melody and harmony will be attrac- 
tive to the ear; that men are capable of friendship, 
and that there is that in the human soul which may 
be made the basis of most enduring affection — so we 
assume it to be true that there is something in man 
which will recognize a distinction of right and wrong; 
which will perceive the beauty and the claims of the 
one, and which will turn from and hate the other. 
Even the man who would lead us into the paths of 
error and sin does not base his hope on the fact that 
error is a thing that ought to be chosen, or that wrong- 
is a thing that ought to be done, but he labors to con- 
vince us that the one is truth, and that the other is 
right, or to lead us into sin, contrary to our convictions 
of what is right and true. The great Tempter ap- 
proached our first parents, not on the presumption 
that there was nothing in them which would respond 
to the claims of right, or that there was no power of 
recognizing the distinctions of right and wrong, but 
with the hope that he might either convince them that 
the evil which he proposed was, in the circumstances, 
right, or that he could induce them to do wrong, know- 
ing that it was wrong. 

It is not asserted by the remark which is now made, 
that there is ability in man, without teaching, or with- 
out an external revelation, to ascertain what is right and 
true, but only that there is that in man which responds 
to the distinctions of right and wrong. It is impossible 



18 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

to see how an appeal could be made to man on any 
moral subject, unless this was assumed ; or how even 
a revelation could be of any value, unless there was 
some such, faculty in man. We may ask, for illustra- 
tion, what would be the use of submitting an argument 
to a man, unless it was assumed that there was a rational 
faculty which would respond to it when it was fairly 
brought before his mind ? what would be the use of 
exhibiting a beautiful painting to the eye, if there was 
not some power in the eye to perceive colors, or in the 
mind to appreciate beauty ? what would be the use of 
the beautiful arrangement in regard to music — the laws 
of vibrations in the air by which the notes of the octave 
are produced — unless there was an ear to receive such 
sounds, and a soul to appreciate such harmony ? In 
all these cases we assume that there is an arrangement 
in the soul which responds to that which is designed to 
impress and affect man ; and with the same certainty 
we assume, in all our attempts to influence others by 
argument, that there is that in man which responds to 
the appeals of truth and right. 

§ 6. A revelation from God will not contradict any truth, 
however that truth is made known. 

This, too, may be assumed as an axiom that com- 
mends itself at once to the mind ; and this can scarcely 
be made plainer by any illustration. "All truth is from 
the sempiternal source of light divine." One truth can- 
not contradict another, as one duty cannot conflict with 
another. 

The following subordinate thoughts may be sug- 
gested here as undoubtedly true, or as following from 
the maxim now under consideration : — 



IN" THE WORD OF GOD. 19 

(a) A revelation will not contradict its own teach- 
ings; that is, it will not deny in one place what it 
affirms in another ; or will not state as a doctrine in 
one place what is a palpable contradiction of what is 
stated in another. He to whom a pretended revela- 
tion is submitted, to be received by him, has a right to 
demand this ; he who urges its claims on mankind is 
bound to show that this is so. 

The remark here made is, that in a true revelation 
there will not be a contradiction; that that will not be 
stated in one place to be true which is denied in 
another; and that there will not be two statements 
which are not susceptible, by fair construction, of being 
reconciled, or which cannot be shown to be consistent. 
It cannot, indeed, be demanded that we shall be able 
to show HOW the one can be reconciled with the other, 
for there are numerous cases in science where it is im- 
possible to show how two facts can be reconciled with 
each other, though there can be no doubt as to the 
certainty of each of the facts taken separately ; but it 
may be demanded that there shall not be one statement 
which can be demonstrated to be wholly irreconcilable 
with another statement in the book. It could not be 
required, for instance, if those were doctrines of revela- 
tion, that we should be able to show how matter may 
be infinitely divisible, or how two lines may approach 
each other forever, and never meet ; but it might be 
required that we should be able to demonstrate that 
this is not absurd, or that it is not impossible that this 
may be true ; or, more to our point, it might be re- 
quired that it should not be affirmed, in one place, that 
lines so produced would meet, and in another place 
that they would not; or that it should not be affirmed 



20 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

in one place that matter is infinitely divisible, and in 
another that it is not. 

(b) A revelation from God will not contradict scien- 
tific truth. 

This proposition is so plain, also, that it could not 
be made more clear by any demonstration. No reve- 
lation from God could make an affirmation that two and 
two make seven, or that all the angles of a triangle are 
equal to three right angles. If a pretended revelation 
should affirm such a thing to be true, men would at 
once, of course, reject it. It would be impossible to 
demonstrate that such a pretended revelation was a 
real one ; and however strong the external argu- 
ments in favor of such a pretended revelation might 
appear to be, mankind would feel assured that there 
must be some mistake in the evidence. 

What is affirmed here must be true also of all scien- 
tific truth. As the universe must have one author; as 
there cannot be independent sovereignties in the uni- 
verse, so that that would be true under one form of 
administration which would be false in the other ; as 
there cannot be different departments under the one 
great administration of the universe, in one of which 
that would be true which would be false in another; 
and as all truth is connected, and the facts in science 
must bear in numberless ways on the truth of revela- 
tion, it follows that a revelation could not contradict 
any established truth of science. 

Three subordinate remarks, however, should be made 
here, which there may be occasion to illustrate more 
fully hereafter. (1.) One is, that the propositions which 
are affirmed to be scientific truths should be such. It 
should be settled that these are truths. There are many 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 21 

things affirmed in the sciences which are not yet de- 
monstrated to be true, though they may be true ; and 
there are many things affirmed which time and more 
full investigations may demonstrate to be false. All 
sciences, in their beginning, have many things attached 
to them, and affirmed in them, which a more full com- 
prehension of the subject demonstrates to have no pro- 
per place in them; and before anything can be definitely 
asserted of the bearing of science on a proposed reve- 
lation, the scientific truth itself should be placed on a 
sure basis, and the different parts of the science properly 
adjusted. (2.) It should be made clear that the proposed 
revelation actually makes any statement on that subject, 
or utters anything in regard to it. The main purpose 
of a revelation, in fact, is not to teach science ; at least 
it will not be pretended now that such a purpose is a 
distinct one in a revelation, though it ■might have been — 
for there is nothing in the nature of things which would 
have made it impossible to communicate all the truth 
now known in regard to astronomy, anatomy, botany 
and geologjr in a revelation. But such, it will now be 
admitted, was not the purpose of any revelation, for 
it seems to be assumed that these things, so far as 
needful to be known by man, lie within the proper 
range of his own faculties, while revelation must 
have reference mainly to things which lie beyond the 
compass of his natural powers. The truths of science, 
therefore, if taught or if alluded to in a revelation, it 
is to be presumed would be communicated only acci- 
dentally, and by the way, and the statement made must 
be regarded and treated as all obiter statements are 
made, and interpreted as statements incidentally made, 
or made by the way ; not as forming the direct teaching 
3 " 



22 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

in the case, and, therefore, as not affecting the main doc- 
trine which it was designed to communicate. If a 
statement is made it should, indeed, be true, and the 
friend of the revelation maybe required to show that the 
statement is not false; but it may be properly required 
that it should be clearly proved that the author of the 
revelation meant to make any affirmation on that sub- 
ject. It may be that he only used the common language 
of men when speaking on that subject, without intend- 
ing either to affirm or deny the correctness of that 
language. (3.) Proper allowance must, therefore, be 
made for this consideration that, as the purpose of 
revelation is not to disclose the higher truths of astro- 
nomy, geology, botany, anatomy, and the kindred 
sciences, it would be natural that the allusion made to 
them, if any should be made, would be according to ap- 
pearances, or as things appear to the mass of men, and 
in the language which men commonly employ. Thus, 
for example, in speaking of the sun, if there were any 
occasion to allude to it, it would be most natural to 
expect to find in the revelation such language as occurs 
in common life, and even among astronomers, when 
they speak of the sun as rising and setting, and not 
language which could be adjusted to the truths of the 
Copernican system, and which would be strictly and 
literally accurate. If this course were not adopted, two 
things would follow : One, that in order to strict accu- 
racy, the highest scientific truths on these subjects 
should be revealed if there was any occasion to allude 
to the subject, which, as we have seen, would be contrary 
to the intention of revelation ; the other, that such lan- 
guage to the mass of men would be, at the time of the 
revelation, and perhaps ever onward, wholly unin- 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 23 

telligible; for are there any of the languages which 
have sprung from Babel that could be more unintelli- 
gible to the mass of mankind than would be an attempt 
to express all thoughts that occur to men on these sub- 
jects in language adjusted to the exactness of science? 
Who, in common life, could use the language which 
would express exactly the truths of the Copernican 
system of astronomy ? Who could understand a man 
that should undertake to describe the rising or the 
setting of the sun, in language adjusted accurately to 
that system? A revelation couched in such terms 
would demand a new revelation to make itself intel- 
ligible to the mass of mankind. 

(c) A revelation will not contradict historical truth. 

This proposition is, also, so clear that no one can 
call it in question. The past is fixed. Historical 
truths are the record of facts which cannot now be 
made otherwise than they are, for the past cannot be 
changed. The only caution that is necessary on this 
point, considered as a rule in judging of a revelation, 
is, that the facts should be ascertained. It should not 
be assumed that all the truths of history are ascertained; 
nor that all historical records are certainly true; nor 
that a mere statement by an historian, ancient or modern, 
however correct in general he may be, is certainly cor- 
rect. ISTor should it be assumed that a statement in a 
profane history is necessarily true, and a statement in a 
sacred history is necessarily false; nor that when the one 
may happen to come into conflict with the other, the 
testimony of the profane historian settles the matter 
against the testimony of the "sacred" historian. It 
may be observed, also, that nothing is more difficult 
than to ascertain the exact truth about an ancient his- 



24 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

torical fact. If we have any doubt about a statement 
pertaining to geometry, we apply the rules of a rigid 
demonstration, for the point relates to a truth which 
never varies, and where the evidence is always the same, 
and always at hand. If we doubt the correctness of a 
statement in regard to chemistry, we go into the labo- 
ratory, and appeal to the crucible and the blowpipe ; 
if an astronomical statement is called in question, we 
make our appeal at once to the telescope. But nothing 
of this kind occurs in regard to an ancient historical 
fact. It is, of course, incapable of mathematical 
demonstration, unless it pertain to some movement of 
the heavenly bodies. The original witnesses are all 
dead, and cannot now be examined ; and, in fact, they 
were never examined. The observations were made, 
perhaps, originally with little care, and but few of the 
circumstances on which the accuracy of a narrative so 
much depends, were stated. The historian may have 
made no exact statement of time; he may have mis- 
interpreted motives; he may have been prejudiced; he 
may, from his point of observation, have made a re- 
port which would have been materially modified if he 
had had some other point of observation, and his state- 
ment may conflict materially with that of some one 
who had. In the long course of ages, also, the statement 
may have passed through many hands before it came 
to be permanently recorded, and when it was recorded 
it may have been under influences which tended much 
to increase the probability that there would be error in 
the statement. The historian may have also introduced 
into his narrative circumstances which he regarded as 
necessary to fill out the account, and to make it con- 
sistent, or he may have omitted circumstances which 



IN THE WOKD OF GOD. 25 

were really essential to a proper understanding of the 
case, but which seemed to him to be needless and cum- 
bersome. It is, therefore, by no means improbable that 
if we had an actually inspired record in respect to what 
are now regarded as established facts in history, the 
existing record would be materially changed; and it 
is quite conceivable that an inspired and correct state- 
ment would contain many things which would be quite 
irreconcilable with what are now received as undoubted 
historical truths. 

(d) A revelation will not contradict any moral truth. 

This point is also clear, if it be admitted that there 
is any such thing as moral truth ; or, in other words, 
if there is that in the nature of things which can be 
regarded as moral truth. If, for example, it be a cor- 
rect statement in morals that a man should not utter 
falsehood; that he should not defraud his neighbor; that 
he should not steal; that he should not commit murder 
—if there is anything in man, or in the nature of things, 
which make these a matter of obligation, then it is 
plain that nothing in a real revelation would be in con- 
flict with these, and with kindred principles. We 
cannot suppose that there is such discord in the uni- 
verse ; that there is such a conflict between nature and 
the God who presides over nature ; that in the admi- 
nistration which God proposes to set up as the moral 
governor of the universe, there is such a discrepancy 
between the rules of duty revealed, and the rules of 
duty engraven on the hearts of men, and founded in 
the fitness of things, that the one would be at vari- 
ance with the other. Men, therefore, do expect, and 
it would seem that they have a right to expect, that a 
revelation from God would be conformed to these well- 



26 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

known and settled principles, and that in a book of 
revealed truth, we shall find nothing that will be con- 
tradictory to truth that may be made known to us in 
any other mode. 

§7. A pretended revelation which should contradict esta- 
blished truth could not be received by mankind. 

This is too plain to admit of demonstration. Two 
opposite statements could not both be received as true. 
No conceivable evidence in favor of a revelation could 
be stronger than the conviction of the mind that two 
and two make four, or that all the angles of a triangle 
are equal to two right angles; in other words, it is 
impossible for the mind to conceive that the evidence 
in favor of a revelation could be so strong as to set 
these truths aside. The mind must believe them. 
That mind is not in a sound state which did not believe 
them. 

How far it is to be admitted that truths in science, 
in morals, in history, are so certain as to come within 
this rule, is quite a distinct question; but the rule itself 
is perfectly clear. 

The rule here referred to, embraces essentially two 
things : — 

(a) If faith in a professed revelation is demanded, 
it is right to require that its statements shall be fairly 
consistent with all the ascertained facts of science. It 
could not be required that the book should reveal the 
truths of science, or, indeed, that it should make any 
statements on the subject at all — for the design of a 
book of revelation would not properly be to teach the 
truths of science; but it would be right to demand 
that, if any statements on the subjects of science occur 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 27 

as essentially connected with the doctrines of the book, 
or if any statements are volunteered, though not essen- 
tial to the main doctrines of the book, they should be, 
by a fair interpretation, in strict accordance with the 
truths of science. 

(b) It is equally proper to demand, on the other 
hand, if there is any alleged conflict between the state- 
ments of the book and the truths of science, that the 
facts of science shall be clearly established. It is right 
for the friends of such a revelation to insist, for exam- 
ple, that the facts in history, which are alleged to be 
irreconcilable with the statements of the alleged reve- 
lation, shall be clearly established as facts ; and, in like 
manner, if it is alleged that the disclosures of geology 
are inconsistent with the statements of the book pro- 
fessing to be a revelation, that the facts of geology 
shall be clearly ascertained. The friends of such a 
revelation have a right to go into the fullest examina- 
tion of these points, and to demand such evidence of 
the truth of the alleged facts as shall be sufficient to 
neutralize all that is urged in behalf of the proposed 
revelation, or such as shall demonstrate that the alleged 
facts cannot possibly be otherwise than they are affirmed 
to be. The science must be demonstrated; the facts 
must be ascertained ; the contradiction must be palpa- 
ble ; the discrepancy must be so great that the state- 
ments cannot, by any fair rules of interpretation, be 
reconciled, or such that it cannot be supposed that a 
larger acquaintance with the subject would make it 
possible that the two statements should be brought into 
harmony. That two and two are four,, and that two 
and two are seven, are statements which camiot, by any 
possibility, be reconciled ; and if one of them occurred 



28 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

as the result of human investigation, and the other as 
the statement of a pretended revelation, they could not 
be reconciled ; no additional light could be thrown on 
the subject by time ; no application of any fair rules 
of interpretation could bring them into harmony. But 
the statements, for example, in the first chapter of Ge- 
nesis are not so palpably inconsistent with the revela- 
tions of geology ; the facts of geology are not yet so 
fully ascertained as to demonstrate that the two state- 
ments cannot be reconciled ; the true interpretation of 
the chapter, on fair principles of exegesis, is not so 
clearly settled that it can yet be assumed that the facts 
in the one case may not be in entire harmony with the 
statements in the other. 

§ 8. A revelation on the same line of subjects will, so 
far as coincident, carry forward the truth already known 
— not contradict it. 

The meaning of this rule is this : that a* revelation 
may make disclosures in regard to truth in advance of 
what is already partially known from other sources, 
or what will be seen to be true when the discoveries of 
science come up to it; that is, they may be such state- 
ments as would at once be seen to be consistent and 
proper, if, at the time when the revelation was made, 
all the truths which science would ever reveal were 
then known ; in other words, that the disclosures of 
revelation will be in advance of, not contradictory to, 
the truths otherwise ascertained. The truth may be 
partially and imperfectly discoverable by reason ; the 
revelation will not contradict the truth thus known, 
but will carry forward the idea, and augment the 
information. Between the two, there will be no more 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 29 

discrepancy than between the actual though imperfect 
knowledge of a child, and the more matured and per- 
fect knowledge of the same child when he becomes a 
man; than between the lowest truths in geometry and 
the highest disclosures in astronomy of Newton or La 
Place. 

An illustration of this point may be derived from 
the disclosures of the telescope. Yast as are the reve- 
lations made by that instrument ; far as it penetrates 
into distant worlds; and much as it has enlarged the 
boundaries of human knowledge, all its disclosures are 
in entire harmony with those of the naked eye, and 
only carry forward, on the same line, what was seen 
by the unaided powers of vision. The telescope never 
penetrates into the empire of another God. It never 
comes into regions where other physical laws prevail 
than those which prevail in the worlds and systems 
seen by the naked eye. It never reveals any laws 
which are contradictory to what was before known. 
The properties and the laws of light, as disclosed by 
the telescope, in the most distant worlds, are the same 
with those of light on earth ; and could the eye itself, 
now so comparatively limited in its range of observa- 
tion, and to which so much of that which the telescope 
reveals is unknown, be so enlarged in its powers as to 
take in all that the telescope reveals, it would see things 
just as it does now by its aid. 

It is to be presumed that the same principle will be 
found to prevail in a revelation from God. So far as 
the statements of such a revelation are on the same 
line of subjects which are made known to us from 
other sources, it will only carry forward the idea. As 
far as the disclosures of reason and of revelation relate 



30 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

to the same subject, they will be entirely the same ; 
where revelation leaves reason in the rear, and goes 
forward to doctrines undiscoverable by mere reason, 
as the telescope leaves our unassisted faculties, and goes 
forward to worlds undiscoverable by the naked eye, 
the new truths will be entirely coincident and harmo- 
nious with those otherwise made known. Could the 
faculty of reason be at once so enlarged as to embrace 
all that is to be known in this wide field of knowledge, 
the same truths would be perceived, and no other, 
which are made known by revelation. And as, if the 
disclosures made by a telescope appear to be contra- 
dictory to those made by the naked eye; if it should be 
affirmed that the laws of light in other worlds, as 
made known by the telescope, are different from those 
in our own, we should infer that there must be some 
imperfection in the instrument, and should at once 
reject such disclosures, so man must reason in regard 
to a pretended revelation. He must be assured, if he 
would receive such a revelation, that all its disclosures 
are in accordance with the clear deductions of reason, 
so far as they are in the same line, and so far as those 
deductions go; if it should be otherwise, he must 
reject it. 

§ 9. A revelation ivill not, in its teachings, violate the 
constitutional imnciples of our nature. 

The word 'constitutional' is used here of design, and 
as clearly defining what is meant to be affirmed. It 
refers to man as he came from God; to the nature with 
which he was originally endowed. It is designed to 
distinguish this from another sense in which the word 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 31 

'nature 7 is sometimes employed now, as referring to 
man, not as be tvas, but as he is. 

Using the term 'nature 1 in the largest sense, man 
has two ' natures ;' that in which he was made by his 
Creator, and that which refers to what he has become 
by his own act ; that which belonged to him as a holy 
being, and that which belongs to him as a sinner. 

(a) There is the original 'nature,' or constitution, 
with which man was endowed. This is the most 
proper signification of the word 'nature, 1 as applied 
to man ; for it is that which distinguished him from 
all the other orders and ranks of being, as he came 
from the hands of his Maker. It was that which pro- 
perly constituted the ' image' of God. It is difficult, 
indeed, now, to determine exactly what this was ; for 
no one in human form, save one, has ever shown, since 
the first man was upon the earth, what this was. We 
can infer what it was only from a few slight hints in 
the account of the creation of man in the Bible, and 
by endeavoring to detach from the idea of man all that 
is the result of corruption and sin, as we ascertain an 
ancient inscription, or an ancient figure on a shield, 
by removing the earth and rust which may have accu- 
mulated around it and over it. 

(b) There is the 'nature' of man as he now is. 
Using the word in this sense, we apply it to man as 
we find him, with all his passions and propensities, as 
a fallen being. We speak not of his original constitu- 
tion, but of that constitution as it has been corrupted 
by the Fall, and by indulgence in sin. 

It is as such a fallen being that we are compelled now 
to look at man ; and it is as such a being that those 
who write about him, and who describe him, commonly 



32 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

regard him. It is from this point of view that most 
of the hooks on mental philosophy have been framed ; 
for in these man is described as he is, not as he was 
when he came from God. It is such a being, not a 
pure and spotless being, with a holy nature, as he came 
from God, that we see acting on the great theatre of 
human affairs. It is for such a being that laws are 
made; it is such a being that is described in the poetry 
and romance of the world ; it is such a being that 
appears personated in the drama, and described in 
history. In no description of man in the works of 
mental philosophy, in history, in poetry, in romance, 
or in the drama, does he appear as he was when he 
came from the hand of God; and where a descrip- 
tion is given of man, it is of man as he is, not as he 
teas — a description of his fallen, and not of his original 
nature. The workings of his mind are not the pure 
workings of mind as God made it, but the work- 
ino-s of a mind under the influence of numberless 
perversities and passions, as it has been blighted and 
ruined by the Fall. It is unfortunate that the books 
on mental philosophy admit, in their descriptions of 
the human faculties, as part of the constitution of man, 
much that is thus the result of a lapsed state — the 
pervertions and accretions that have been the result of 
the apostasy. It is not man pure and holy, as he was 
when he was made, that we now see, but man ambi- 
tious, proud, sensual, covetous, envious, irritable, vain; 
man not with a clear intellect, but man with an intellect 
clouded by sin ; man not believing and confiding, but 
man skeptical and doubting; man not hopeful and 
cheerful, but man desponding and gloomy ; man not 
upright and pure, but man degraded and impure. 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 33 

Hence no system of mental philosophy, considered as 
a description of the original constitution or 'nature' 
of man, has been in all respects a correct system; for 
none bas told what man was, or what he would be, 
without sin. Yet, it is evident that, judging of man 
as he is now, we must form a very imperfect and erro- 
neous idea of his ' nature] in the highest and best 
sense of the term; and that just in proportion as we 
mistake this for the original constitution of man, and 
allow this idea to intermingle with our conceptions of 
his nature, we are certain to err. 

(c) It is to be observed, however, that, underlying all 
that is depraved and impure, there are indications of 
the original constitution of man, and of what may 
properly be regarded as his 'nature' as he came from 
the hand of his Maker. Even amidst all the ruins of 
the Fall, and all the disorders which sin has made, it 
is still possible to discover what the original constitu- 
tion of man was ; what man would be if he were wholly 
restored. There are accurate deductions of reason; 
there are just convictions of conscience; there is a moral 
sense which approves of what is right, and which dis- 
approves of what is wrong. There is a perception of 
what is right in the relations of life ; in the duties 
which men owe to their fellow-men; in the duties 
which they owe their Maker. There are things which 
all men see to be right, and there are things which all 
men see to be wrong. There is something in man which 
is the basis of appeals on the subject of morals; and 
there is something which — when the decisions of the 
mind are not prompt and clear on the subject of 
morals; when men are sunk in debasement and igno- 
rance ; when they seem almost to be unable to deter- 



34 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

mine between right and wrong — is the foundation of a 
belief that they may be so elevated as to take their proper 
position, and discern correctly between right and wrong. 
We assume of the most degraded of the race that they 
may be raised, by redemption, to the highest attain- 
ments in determining between right and wrong; we 
assume that man is endowed with the faculties of 
reason, conscience, and moral sense ; we assume that 
all which is necessary, in respect to these faculties, to 
place him in the position in which he was originally 
made, is regeneration and sanctiflcation, or the restora- 
tion of the image of God to the heart. 

The remark which is here made is, that a revelation 
will not do violence to the nature of man as thus ex- 
plained. It will be in accordance with the original 
constitution of our minds; it will be such as will com- 
mend itself to the just principles of nature ; it will be 
such as the conscience, under the highest teachings, 
and in the most perfect state, will approve ; it will be 
such as will commend itself to the moral sense of man- 
kind, when that moral sense is developed in the best 
and most perfect forms; it will contain nothing which 
will be contradictory to either of these things; and if 
a pretended revelation did contain that which was a 
contradiction of these things, it could not be embraced 
by mankind. 

It may be admitted, indeed, and must be, that the 
proper limitations on this subject are not yet entirely 
settled, and that there is great danger, in the present 
fallen condition of the human soul, that they will be 
mistaken; that in forming such a judgment, what is 
the fruit of prejudice or passion, what results from 
pride, from selfishness, and from enmity to the truth 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 35 

itself, will be mistaken for the proper judgment of the 
mind, and be allowed to influence men in forming 
their opinion whether a professed revelation is from 
God. The remark now made is, that the judgment in 
the case must be founded on the clear principles of our 
nature or constitution as we came from God, or must 
be a repetition of the revelation of his will in the 
original constitution of man. 

Thus, if in a book professing to be a revelation from 
God, a command were found to treat our children with 
neglect, such a command would be a clear demonstra- 
tion that the book containing it could not be from God, 
and the race could not be bound to receive it. For 
there is a law of our nature as universal as any law 
can be — a law that reigns and rules in all lands, and 
that is engraved in the hearts of all men — which re- 
quires us to love our children, and to provide for them 
in their helplessness and dependence. No one can 
doubt that this is the law of Him who made man. No 
one violates that law without feeling that he has done 
wrong. No custom of society that interferes with this 
could obtain universal Currency among men ; no opin- 
ions of philosophy which denied its obligation, could 
be embraced by mankind. And however much savage 
tribes may for a time depart from that law, and what- 
ever customs may spring up in the world that impinge 
on this principle, the original law will ultimately claim 
to be heard; that law will assert its dominion, and 
society will oscillate back to its true position — as, in 
the movements of the heavenly bodies, if there seems 
to be, even for the longest series of years, a departure 
from some great law which threatens ultimate universal 
ruin, the heavenly bodies will swing back again to 



36 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

their former position, and the universe will right itself 
again* So in society. A violation of the law here 
referred to would tend to universal ruin. Society — 
the race — could not exist unless it icere a great law that 
parents should love their children, and provide for 
their wants. The very necessities of our nature de- 
mand tliis, and men cannot proceed far in their disre- 
gard of the law without impinging on a great original 
principle of nature which reasserts its power, and re- 
stores the balance again, and brings the movements of 
society into harmony with the will of God. 

* See a profound and beautiful illustration of this fact, as secur- 
ing the " Stability of the Planetary System," in Prof. 0. M. Mitchell's 
Lectures on " The Planetary and Stellar Worlds," pp. 163-191. Ed. 

1849. 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 37 



CHAPTER II. 

APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING PRINCIPLES IN 
JUDGING OF A REVELATION. 

§ 1. Reason as an element in judging of a revelation. 

(a) Keason, or our rational nature, must be one ele- 
ment in judging of a revelation. 

This, in the nature of the case, could not be other- 
wise. Our rational nature, that by which, more than 
by anything else, we are distinguished from the brute 
creation, was given to us, in part at least, for a guide ; 
and there is no subject on which we more need a guide 
than religion. It is impossible to conceive that a re- 
vealed system of religion should have no reference to 
our rational nature, or should make no appeal to it ; 
that is, that in this respect a revelation should come to 
us as it would to an ox or a horse. God endowed us 
with reason, and this high endowment must have had 
reference to himself, to a suitable recognition of him, 
to his service, to the claims of his law, to the duties 
which we owe to him. A revelation which should 
profess to ignore reason, or which should claim to set 
aside its fair teachings, would not be received by man- 
kind, for nothing can be more certain than that we 
have this endowment, and that it is given to be, in 
some way, a guide in everything that pertains to us. 

(b) The great question, then, is, what is the proper 

4 



38 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

province of reason in relation to a revelation, or how 
far it is to be regarded. 

On this point, the following seem to be clear and in- 
disputable principles : — 

1. The teachings of reason are absolute and final, in 
all those cases which come within its province, and 
where its teachings are clear. Thus, that two and two 
make four, and that all the angles of a triangle are 
equal to two right angles, are truths which are never 
to be set aside by any higher teaching, for they are so 
certain and absolute that no higher teaching could make 
them otherwise. God could not teach otherwise than 
this. He could neither affirm that this is not so, nor 
could he make it not to be so by any teaching. Mow 
far the teaching of reason goes, what is its province, 
into what fields it enters, and what fields lie beyond it, 
are points, indeed, that are fair subjects of inquiry; 
but within the proper province of the faculty, the 
teachings of reason are so absolute that they cannot be 
set aside. The whole science of mathematics evidently 
comes under this rule ; no small part of the natural 
sciences ; not a little of mental philosophy, and many 
of the truths of moral philosophy. But the proper 
province of reason, in respect to the point now under 
consideration, has never been settled, and most of the 
errors of theology have arisen from the fact that reason 
is allowed to be an umpire in matters which lie wholly 
beyond its proper range. 

2. Eeason is to be a guide in determining the evi- 
dences of a revelation. No revelation can be received 
which does not commend itself to the reason as true, 
or which does not furnish to the reason satisfactory 
evidence that it is from God. There may be other 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 39 

things to which the appeal may also be made, but the 
evidence must be satisfactory to this tribunal. However 
much a religion may commend itself to the feelings or 
the imagination, however much it may do to promote 
the happiness of man, whatever hopes it may cherish 
and inspire, or however it may have been sanctioned 
by a venerable antiquity, it must have such evidence of 
its divine origin as to secure the assent of the highest 
forms of reason of which man is capable, or so that the 
human intellect, in its advances, can never reach a 
point where the evidence of its truth from reason would 
fail. 

Of the evidences of a divine revelation reason must 
be the absolute judge. Whatever may be the nature 
of the evidence, it is competent to the reason to pro- 
nounce upon it. Whether it be miracles, or prophecy, 
or the doctrines that are taught, or the influence and 
tendency of the religion, the ultimate appeal must be 
made to the reason of mankind. 

3. It is the proper province of reason to receive the 
truths of revelation when the fact of a revelation is 
established. Keason receives the results of evidence. 
It makes them its own. It embraces them as firmly as 
it does the self-evident truth with which a mathematical 
demonstration commences. The highest truths of ma- 
thematics are embraced by the mind that is conducted to 
them by a fair process of reasoning, with as much firm- 
ness and certainty as the axiom that at the beginning is 
assumed to be true, and faith in the one can no more 
be shaken than faith in the other. So in revelation. 
When reason has demonstrated the truth of a revelation, 
then the teachings of that revelation become just as 
certain to the mind as the deductions and conclusions 



40 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

of its own reason, and it would as much violate the 
proper province of reason to reject those truths as it 
would to reject the plainest demonstrations of geometry. 
"Whatever these truths may be, reason is then as much 
in its own proper province in admitting them and in 
allowing them to influence the mind in all its actions, 
as it is in submitting itself to the guidance of its own 
conclusions. 

4. In points where the teachings of revelation are 
beyond the deductions of reason, then the proper pro- 
vince of reason is, clearly, to regard itself as subordinate 
to those higher teachings. It can demand only that 
those teachings shall not be contradictory to any of the 
teachings of reason ; it cannot require that they shall 
not be above and beyond. The eye could demand of the 
telescope only that its teachings should not be contra- 
dictory to any of the teachings of natural vision ; it 
could not require that its teachings should not be above 
and beyond. Far as it may extend the range of vision; 
numberless, and strange, and vast, and incomprehen- 
sible as may be the worlds and systems whose existence 
and laws it discloses, it can only demand that nowhere 
in the depths of the blue ether, in the new worlds 
brought to view, in the movements of satellites and 
comets, in nebulae fixed or moving in infinite space, 
there shall be nothing that is contradictory to the laws 
of vision belonging to the naked eye ; that the telescope 
shall be properly an extension of the range of observa- 
tion, not an instrument to contradict all, or anything 
that man knows from other sources. With this limita- 
tion the eye greets with joy all that the telescope dis- 
closes respecting distant worlds. Without this, the 
telescope would be regarded as a deceptive instrument, 






IN THE WORD OF GOD.' 41 

and its pretended disclosures could not be received as 
true. 

(c) A material question here occurs : How far will 
a revelation from heaven modify the deductions of 
reason ? 

The general reply to this question, of course, is, that 
it would not in any way modify the deductions of pure 
and correct reason. The truths discovered by reason 
are truths, and no truth can by revelation be made dif- 
ferent from what it is. No revelation could modify 
the propositions so frequently referred to already, that 
two and two make four, and that all the angles of a 
triangle are equal to two right angles. In reference 
to these, and to all similar truths, all that a revelation 
could do would be what is done in the higher disclo- 
sures of mathematical truths, to show the place which 
these truths occupy in the system, and their bearing 
on other truths that may be made known. 

But while this is certain, it is also certain that a re- 
velation might have an important bearing on what are 
supposed to be truths made known by reason, in the 
following respects : — 

1. In respect to those truths in which the disclosures 
of reason are imperfect, or where they come short of the 
whole truth. Up to a certain point all may be clear 
and correct ; beyond that, all may be obscure and dark. 
On that region of darkness revelation may shed a clear 
light, disclosing truths that man could never discover 
by the aid of mere reason, and where the truths already 
made known by reason would furnish no help, and yet 
all would be in accordance with the truths before dis- 
covered. 

2. Eevelation might set aside many things that seem 



42 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

to result from the discoveries of pure reason ; many 
things that have been derived even from correct pre- 
mises. The doctrines which reason may be supposed 
to have discovered, may seem to be fair conclusions 
from the premises ; and yet it may be true that the 
conclusions reached are all false. The ignorance of 
the true doctrine may be so real, and the region so 
dark, and so impenetrable by any powers of the mind, 
that the mind may be unable to see the errors, or to 
detect the fallacy, and yet there may he an error and a 
fallacy which it might be the proper province of a re- 
velation to expose and remove. The mind itself might, 
indeed, never have detected the fallacy ; it might never 
of itself have seen that the supposed true doctrine did 
not result from the premises ; and yet the revelation 
of a true doctrine on the subject might show the error, 
and at the same time be seen to be more entirely con- 
sistent with the conclusions of reason than what had 
been supposed to be the true doctrine was. 

3. All those doctrines which are the result of con- 
clusions from wrong principles would be set aside, of 
course, by a revelation. In such cases, the conclusion 
might be fairly derived from the premises assumed, 
and yet as these premises were false, the effect of a re- 
velation would be to set the whole aside. By a state- 
ment of just principles, the whole superstructure would 
fall. Thus, for example, certain forms of doctrine, 
extending very far, follow from the views which are 
taken of human nature, and the whole system, perhaps 
an entire system of theology, would depend on the 
doctrine assumed to be true on that subject. If it 
should be assumed that man is not fallen, that he is 
pure, that he has no more propensity to evil than to good, 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 43 

then there would follow from that an entire system of 
theological views of a very peculiar character. If it 
should be assumed that man is fallen, that he is wholly 
depraved, that there is a propensity to sin which always 
develops itself except as restrained and checked by the 
grac^ of God, then an opposite system follows from that 
assumption, extending into an entirely different view 
of the whole work of saving men. In both cases, the 
reasoning by which the systems are supported, might 
be perfectly correct if the premises were admitted ; in 
either case, the system would fall if a revelation should 
settle the disputed point about the nature, character, and 
tendency of man. 

4. All those cases in which reason had been warped 
or perverted by prejudice, by passion, or by selfish- 
ness, would be modified by a true revelation. This 
might not occur in purely scientific subjects; but there 
is a large class of subjects pertaining to morals where 
the whole form of the doctrines embraced would be 
shaped by the colored medium through which the sub- 
ject was viewed. In fact, no small part of the moral and 
religious systems in the world have had their origin in 
the heart rather than in the head ; and all such would 
be affected by a correct system of revealed truth. 

The friends of revelation, it would seem, must con- 
cede the principles laid down in this section, and the 
enemies of revelation have a right to hold them to these 
principles. The world will hold the advocates of 
revealed truth to these principles. It will be impossi- 
ble to convince mankind of the truth of a pretended 
revelation in which these principles are not recognized, 
and no system in which they are not, in fact, admitted, 
can secure a permanent hold on the world. Circum- 



44 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

stances might give a temporary triumph and prevalence 
to a pretended revelation which should violate these 
principles ; but the nature with which man is endowed 
will, sooner or later, react, and reason will assert its 
proper place. It acknowledges ultimate subordination 
only to a true revelation from God. For its 'own 
department, it is supreme ; it yields permanently only 
when a higher teaching, pertaining to regions beyond 
its proper domain, enlarges its own just conclusions, and 
sets aside those which are false. 

§ 2. The moral sense as an element in judging of a reve- 
lation. 

(a) It is an element in judging of a revelation. The 
moral sense — the conscience, the power of deciding on 
good and evil — is one of the original principles of 
our nature, found among all men, and, therefore, a part 
of the constitution with which man was endowed. It 
is impossible to conceive of man except as endowed 
with this faculty : for, in all our descriptions of man, 
this idea is as essential as the idea of reason. It is one 
of the things which separate him from the inferior crea- 
tion, and which is never approached by any of the 
inferior creation ; one of the things which assimilates 
man to the orders of creatures above him, however 
exalted, and however unlike him they may be in other 
respects ; one of the things which give man a resem- 
blance to God himself. As a revelation must pertain 
to duty as well as to truth, it is clear that there must 
be, so far as duty is concerned, a recognition of this 
faculty, as there must be a recognition of the faculty 
of reason, so far as truth is concerned. 

(b) A pretended revelation could not be received by 



IN THE WOKD OF GOD. 45 

mankind which paid no respect to this faculty, or which 
contradicted its plain teachings and decisions. Man is 
so made, for example, that he must obey his conscience. 
A pretended revelation which should teach that he 
was never to obey his conscience, or that he was to 
make it a rule of life to go against his conscience, 
could not possibly be from the same Being who has 
made man as he is, and who has taught him, by his 
very constitution, that his conscience is to be obeyed, 
and that to act against its decisions is sin. Two systems 
so unlike as these would be could not possibly be from 
the same source ; and as man is so made that he can 
have no doubt as to his obligation to obey the dictates 
of his conscience, a system which should teach and 
enforce the contrary must be rejected by mankind. It 
may be laid down, therefore, as an undoubted truth, 
that, if a revelation could not be made to " commend 
itself" to the consciences of men, it would not be from 
God. 

(c) A very material question, therefore, arises : how 
far this rule is to be allowed to control us in judging 
of a revelation, or what, if any, are the proper limita- 
tions of the rule ? 

1. There are things so universally agreed on by 
mankind as to show that they are laws of our nature, 
and they must be respected and confirmed, if a revela- 
tion is to be received by the world. What is the exact 
range of these subjects, how many things are included, 
may be, indeed, a question, for on this point, as on 
most others, there are three classes of subjects: (a) 
There are those which are perfectly plain, and which 
are at once seen to be right; (b) There are those which 
are with equal clearness at once seen to be wrong; and 



46 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

(c) There is a middle class, a large margin, where it may 
be doubtful whether an action is right or wrong ; or, 
in other words, there is a region of perfect light, a 
region of perfect darkness, and an extended twilight, 
which is neither. 

An illustration of this point may be derived from 
taste. There is such a thing as correct taste in poetry, in 
eloquence, in statuary, in painting. It may not be easy 
to determine, in the abstract, what this is, and there 
may be a variety of subjects on which the tastes of 
nations or individuals would differ. Yet there is a 
correct standard of taste: a standard in accordance 
with which the best specimens of poetry and the arts 
are preserved and sent down to the admiration of future 
times. Now, if we were to conceive of a revelation on 
the subject of taste, we should be certain that it would 
accord with the general judgment of mankind. A 
revelation which should declare that the works of 
Homer were not, in the main, in accordance with the 
decisions of correct taste, or that the Apollo Belvidere, 
or the Venus de Medici, or that the Cartoons of Eaphael, 
or the Aurora of Guido, were in bad taste, would be 
practically rejected by mankind. These works of art 
would continue to be admired in spite of the decisions 
of such a revelation ; nor is it probable that such a 
revelation would make the least perceptible change in 
the general judgment of mankind in regard to them. 
In spite of the decisions of such a revelation, the poems 
of Homer would continue to be printed and read, Flo- 
rence would be crowded with the lovers of the arts, 
and Eome, which has preserved so many specimens of 
taste, would be the resort of as many pilgrims as now. 
So it would be in a pretended revelation in regard to 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 47 

morals or religion. There is a large class of subjects 
on which men everywhere would act as they do now ; 
and if such a revelation did not recognize the justness 
of these principles, it would be rejected by mankind. 
Men would recognize the obligation to be honest, to be 
humane, to respect their parents, to declare the truth, 
whatever might be the command of such a revelation, 
and however practically they may now disregard these 
principles in their conduct, it could never be possible 
to commend to mankind as a code from heaven — from 
the true God — a system of teaching which should 
declare that the common rules of morality are not 
obligatory. 

2. A revelation will accord with the highest develop- 
ment of moral truth in the progress of society. It 
will not only meet the comparatively limited, though 
just views of morality in the primitive stages of so- 
ciety, and in the uncultivated portions of the world, 
but it will accord with the highest attainments in 
moral truth which the world has reached, or will 
reach; for a revelation must be made for all ages, 
and all lands. And as a revelation for the race must 
be designed for all times and all lands, a time never 
can come, and a state of society never can exist, 
which will be on the subjects on which a revelation 
is made in advance of it. It is not enough, therefore, 
to be able to show that the revelation is, in these re- 
spects, up to the age in which it was made, or that it 
did not contradict any of the truths then known ; it 
must be up to every age, and must contradict none of 
the truths that will ever be discovered. It must be as 
really adapted to the highest stage of civilization, in- 
telligence, and refinement, as to the lowest ; it must as 



48 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

really be in advance of the highest point to which 
society ever will come, as it was of the lowest and 
humblest condition or state of the world when it was 
given. If not so, then it could easily be demonstrated, 
that a revelation was not necessary for man — since in the 
regular development of knowledge, without such a 
revelation, society would ultimately come up to the 
point where a revelation would place the race; or, if 
it contained principles which were contradictory to 
those which would be established in a future age by 
the unaided efforts of the human intellect, that fact 
would prove that it was false; for truths, whether dis- 
covered by human wisdom, or revealed directly by 
God, cannot be contradictory to each other. Such a 
revelation as should fall behind the highest attainments 
of society might indeed be useful in the lower stages 
of society, until the powers of man should come up to 
its disclosures ; but a professed revelation that should 
be contradictory to any of the discoveries which the hu- 
man intellect could make in its highest exercise, could 
not possibly be from God. 

3. If a revelation does not meet these conditions, it 
will be rejected, sooner or later, by the world. It 
cannot hold on its way; it cannot secure an ascend- 
ancy permanently over the human intellect, unless it 
is found to be in accordance with these conditions. 
However it may for a time secure a hold on the 
faith of mankind; however it may seem to promote 
human happiness; however it may appear to impart 
comfort and hope in the world, yet if it do not meet 
these conditions, it will sooner or later be rejected 
by mankind. One of the indisputable conditions on 
which the world is to be kept from infidelity is, that 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 49 

the revelation proposed to mankind shall accord with 
the highest disclosures of truth as learned from any 
other source, and that it shall be in advance of all other 
disclosures in its own peculiar department. And what 
is true in general in this respect, is true also in detail. 
If the revelation teaches any doctrine which can be 
demonstrated to be contradictory to the disclosures of 
truth from other quarters, or if, in its own proper de- 
partment, it does not contain disclosures that are in 
advance of what men might gain from other sources, 
that particular doctrine will be rejected, and a rejection 
of a doctrine from such a cause will drag down with 
it the entire book which claims to be a revelation from 
God. Just in proportion as a professed revelation 
should be found to contain sentiments, or authorize 
acts, or lend its countenance to institutions, customs, 
or laws that violate the moral sense of mankind, 
that are contrary to the spirit of humanity, that 
impede the progress of society, that cramp and fet- 
ter the human powers, that are contrary to the best 
arrangements in the family relation, or that tend to 
debase and degrade mankind, just in that proportion 
will infidels be made in regard to such a pretended 
revelation; for mankind will not receive a system as 
from heaven that violates the established principles of 
our nature. And hence it follows that all the defenders 
of a revelation, in proportion as they endeavor to show 
that it sanctions and sustains such institutions and 
customs, become the promoters of infidelity in the 
world, and are, to the extent of their influence, and the 
success of their arguments, responsible for the infi- 
delity that may prevail. A pretended revelation that, 
by its fair teaching, sustained oppression and wrong; 



50 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

that was the advocate of ignorance and barbarity ; 
that fostered a spirit of revenge; that encouraged licen- 
tiousness, or any of the institutions that contribute to 
the indulgence of licentiousness ; that advocated irre- 
sponsible power, or that placed slavery on the same 
basis as the relation of parent and child, husband and 
wife, guardian and ward, would so impinge on the great 
principles of our nature, and be so at war with the best 
interests of society, that the world could not ultimately 
receive it, and all who should endeavor to show that 
such a revelation did sustain and countenance such 
doctrines, would of necessity become the practical dif- 
fusers of infidelity in the world. 

(d) It is a material inquiry, however, how far a 
revelation would modify the opinions of men as to what 
is right and wrong, or whether it should be allowed to 
effect any change in the sentiments that are ultimately 
to be employed in judging of its own claims. Is it to 
be demanded that it shall conform in its decisions to 
what is actually received among men on the subject of 
morals, or must it be allowed to set up a standard of 
its own, supposing that, however the prevailing opin- 
ions of men may differ from that, it will so commend 
its new precepts to what is in men that they will per- 
ceive it to be right. Will it presume on the existing 
moral sense among mankind, or will it create a higher 
and purer moral sense which will itself become the 
standard of appeal in the truths which it proposes for 
belief. 

Both these things are, to some extent, true : — 
1. There is a class of moral truths which are received 
by all men, and which are never to be varied. How 
wide the field is, and what it may embrace, it may be 



IN THE WORD OF GOB. 51 

difficult to define, for there is a large margin that is 
indeterminate and doubtful. But there | are moral 
truths which are well settled in the estimation of man- 
kind, and which are to remain so : truths which com- 
mend themselves to man as entirely and as universally 
as the canons of a correct taste do, or as the elementary 
principles of geometry, and which could never be set 
aside by the teachings of revelation. These truths are 
the basis of morals. They are found essentially in the 
writings of Confucius and Seneca, as well as in the 
Moral Philosophy of Paley. They are essential to the 
well-working of society, and would soon be wrought 
out again, and in substantially the same forms, if all 
existing books on morals were destroyed, and if society 
were to begin anew. All that revelation could do, in 
regard to these truths, would be to confirm them by its 
own authority, to separate them from errors to which 
they might be attached, and to enlarge their sphere. 

2. But there is a much larger number of points on 
which revelation would be absolute. Intermingled 
with those truths of morals above referred to, there are 
many errors which it would set aside. There are local 
opinions and practices which have no foundation in 
any law of nature, and which it would set aside. There 
are laws of human enacting which it would supersede. 
There are rules regulating oppressive and unjust sys- 
tems, and which are essential to the existence of those 
systems, which it would abolish. There are opinions 
and customs which are the result of ignorance, or pas- 
sion, or false systems of religion, or pride of life, oveir 
which its control would be entire. All these it wouhj. 
abolish, and it would establish a purer morality in their 
place. 



52 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

Yet even in regard to these, it is to be observed that 
it would not merely abolish them by its own absolute 
authority, but it would, at the same time, create such 
a moral sense by its influence that men would see and 
approve of the principles of the religion which did 
abolish thsm, or which, even if there were no positive 
precept in the case, would lead men of themselves to 
abolish those rules. Thus, in the laws, for instance, 
which Christianity has originated in regard to polygamy, 
to infanticide, to human sacrifices, to revenge, to the 
appeal to God by duel, it has, at the same time, created 
such a conscience or moral sense that the minds of men 
approve the change ; such a moral sense that, in most 
of these instances, even if there had been no direct 
rule of Christianity on the subject, the change would 
have been produced by men themselves, by the silent 
influence of the religion in new moulding the moral 
sense of mankind. Perhaps it is not too much to affirm 
that there is no existing evil in the moral world which 
Christianity, by such a silent influence, if fairly applied, 
could not remove, even without an absolute precept ; 
certain it is that there are none of its peculiar laws 
which do not commend themselves to the moral sense 
of men — either the original moral sense, as Christianity 
finds men, or the newly formed moral sense of man- 
kind, where its influence is properly felt. Many of the 
evils of the world silently melt away under that influ- 
ence, even where there is no positive precept; and 
when that religion shall pervade the earth, and shall 
transform the moral opinions of men and the customs 
of society into conformity to its own standard, it will 
sustain itself by its own power — by its commending 
itself, in all respects, either to the original moral sense 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 53 

of mankind — the deep, fundamental principles of our 
nature in regard to moral truth — or to that high and 
pure moral sense which Christianity will have created 
in anticipation of its ultimate triumphs, and as the 
basis on which its eternal reign is to rest. 

§ 3. Science as an element in judging of a revelation. 

The following are manifestly correct principles on 
this subject : — 

(1) Science is, and must be, an element in judging 
of the claims of a revelation from God. Science is, 
properly, a mere statement of truths or facts, arranged 
into a system, and those truths or facts constitute, pro- 
perly, the science. Whatever theory may be proposed 
in explanation of the facts, or whatever hypothesis may 
be adopted, the facts constitute the science, and are all 
for which the science is responsible. The theory — the 
hypothesis — may or may not be correct; the classifica- 
tion may or may not be perfect and complete ; but the 
facts or truths, as far as facts and truths are known on 
the subject, are to be regarded as constituting the sci- 
ence. Thus, there are certain facts in regard to the 
" changes of composition that occur among the inte- 
grant and constituent parts of different bodies" (Henry), 
or to " those operations by which the intimate nature 
of bodies is changed, or by which they acquire new 
properties" (Davy), constituting the science of chemis- 
try ; there are certain facts in regard to the structure 
and functions of the human frame, to the motions of 
the heavenly bodies, to the structure and laws of plants, 
constituting the sciences of anatomy, astronomy, and 
botany. These are what they are, and cannot be 
affected by any revelation. They remain the same 
5 



54 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

whatever system of religion or morals may prevail on 
the earth. They could not be made different from 
what they are by a revelation. Better and more per- 
fect theories, in explanation of these sciences, might, 
perhaps, be proposed, than those which now prevail ; 
new facts might be brought to light, if the revelation 
extended to such disclosures ; things which had been 
regarded as facts might be set aside; but the facts 
themselves could not be changed. 

It is true that a revelation might be made which 
would in no manner come into contact with the dis- 
closures of science on these subjects. It might be so 
framed as to make disclosures only on moral and re- 
ligious subjects, and be so entirely independent of all 
the subjects of science that there could be no conflict, 
or no points of contact. But this could scarcely be 
expected. The world is God's own world — made, fash- 
ioned, and governed by Him; and the/ads in relation 
to its creation, its history, its design in manifesting the 
evidence and goodness of God, are so obvious and so 
material, that it is not to be presumed that there would 
be no allusion in a revelation from God that would 
bear in any manner on the subjects of science. 

(2) If any statements are made in a revelation bear- 
ing on the subject of science, those statements must 
be consistent with the disclosures of science. 

This remark is to be taken in the most absolute sense. 
A pretended revelation could not be a revelation from 
God, if it contradicted any of the facts or truths of 
science. These facts or truths, as already remarked, 
are fixed, and are not subject to change; and a state- 
ment from God himself, who has made all things, and 



IN THE WOKD OF GOP. 55 

who knows all things, must be in accordance with those 
facts. 

But it must be true science. The facts must be 
clearly ascertained. We cannot assume that all which 
has been regarded as science, or all which has been 
connected with the sciences as theories, or hypotheses, 
is true science. The friends of revelation have a right 
to demand that the alleged facts of science shall be 
beyond question, or such as are fully established ; and 
they have a right to institute the most thorough exa- 
mination of the alleged facts of science before they 
are called upon to meet the question whether they are 
or are not in conflict with revelation. In respect to 
this, there is occasion for more modesty and diffidence 
than have always been manifested by scientific men 
on the points where science has seemed to come into 
conflict with revelation. They who are best informed 
as to the history of science, will be among the most 
cautious in coming to hasty conclusions on this sub- 
ject. They will remember how many theories have 
prevailed on each of the sciences, which have ultimately 
been abandoned; how imperfect science has been in past 
times, and how far from perfection it is now; how few 
of all the facts which enter properly into science have 
been observed, and how imperfectly nature has been 
analyzed: they will not be slow to perceive how wide 
is the range of scientific truths as contemplated by the 
Creator in comparison with the range which passes 
under the observation of the most gifted of mankind 
— how little, in fact, is known of the wonders of a 
universe which required in its constitution all the wis- 
dom and power of an infinite God, and they will not 
hastily come to the conclusion that the facts are so fully 



56 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

and certainly known in any one of the sciences as to 
make it sure that longer observation, or more pro- 
found analysis, might not bring it into conformity 
to a statement in a professed revelation that might 
seem to come in conflict with the science as at present 
understood. 

Further : a revelation from God will be consistent 
with the discoveries of science in its highest develop- 
ments, or in its ultimate attainments. In other words, 
there can never arrive a period when a true revelation 
would not retain as firm a hold on the human mind as 
in the rudest stages of society ; that is, the discoveries 
of science can never outrun the disclosures of revela- 
tion. As God is the author of a true revelation, and 
as he is the author of the world, and, therefore, the 
source of all knowledge, alike in science and revelation, 
the two must ultimately harmonize. It cannot be con- 
ceived, therefore, that the disclosures in geology, for 
example, will be ultimately found to be inconsistent 
with the fair interpretation of the book of Genesis 
about the creation of the world, if it be admitted that 
the book of Genesis is a part of a revelation from God. 
The unbeliever has a right to demand that at any and 
every stage of the investigation no one fact shall be 
inconsistent with a proper interpretation of the book 
of Genesis, and he has an equal right to demand that 
all the statements of the book of Genesis, bearing in 
any way on the subject, shall, by a fair interpretation, 
be consistent with the ultimate disclosures of the 
science. 

But while this general proposition must be conceded 
by the friends of revelation, and the friends of science 



IN THE WOKD OF GOD. 57 

respectively to be correct, there are two remarks which 
it is proper to make respecting the principle : 

(a) One is, that the investigations of science and the 
interpretation of the Bible should be pursued in accord- 
ance with their own proper laws, and each one irre- 
spective of the results which may be reached in the 
investigations of the other. The pursuit of truth in 
every department should be on fair and independent 
principles, whatever may be the ultimate result. Facts, 
in the one case, should not be forcibly made to bend, 
nor language, in the other, in order that the one may 
be accommodated to the other. The friend of science 
should be allowed to pursue his investigations, so far 
as the result to be reached is concerned, with as entire 
independence as though there were no book in the 
world pretending to be a revelation — that is, for the 
time, ignoring, so far as his science is concerned, the 
existence of the Bible ; and the frieDd of revelation 
should be held to a rigid and fair interpretation of the 
words of his book as though the disclosures of science 
were wholly unknown — that is, for the time, so far as 
his department is concerned, ignoring all the facts of 
science. In other words, in the laboratory, in the ob- 
servatory, in the examination of fossil remains, a text 
of Scripture should be allowed in no manner to mingle 
with the revelations of the crucible, the telescope, and 
the blowpipe; or with the 'testimony of the rocks,' either 
in regard to the age of the earth, the records of former 
times, or the movements of the heavenly bodies. In 
these investigations, the question is not even to be 
asked whether the disclosures of science and of reve- 
lation will ultimately coincide, or whether they will be 
found to be contradictory and irreconcilable. That is 



58 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

a point to be determined after the investigations are 
all made, and all the facts are ascertained. The moment 
that a man of science allows a question respecting the 
harmony of his conclusions in science with a book 
pretending to be a revelation, to influence him in his 
inquiries, that moment the true spirit of scientific in- 
vestigation has departed, for he has left the proper 
province of science, and abandoned an essential prin- 
ciple in all scientific investigations ; and the moment a 
friend of revelation allows a consideration of this kind 
to influence his mind, and to induce him to pervert a 
word from its proper meaning with a view to accom- 
modate it to some statement of science that is in con- 
flict with the fair statement of the book before him, 
that moment he has abandoned his proper province as 
an interpreter of revelation. 

(b) The other remark is, that while this is a just 
principle, and one to which the friend of revelation 
should be willing to be held, it is also to be remembered 
that a current and prevailing interpretation of a reve- 
lation may be a false interpretation, and that it may 
occur that while there seems to be a discrepancy, or a 
contradiction between the statements of such a book 
and the disclosures of science, a true and fair interpre- 
tation may be entirely consistent with all the facts dis- 
closed by science. Nothing has been more common in 
the church than to affix a false interpretation to the 
Scriptures, and then to hold this as an essential part of 
the true faith; nothing more common than to persecute 
those who held some doctrine of science in conflict with 
that false interpretation, and to regard them as heretics. 
No small part of the persecutions which have occurred 
in the church have arisen, not from any denial of a 






IN THE WORD OF GOD. 59 

true doctrine of the Bible, but from a denial of some 
opinion which was held to be a doctrine of the Bible, 
and which was sanctioned by the church, but which a 
more correct interpretation has shown to be no part of 
the teachings of revelation. Thus Galileo was perse- 
cuted, not for any real denial of a doctrine of revela- 
tion, but for maintaining an opinion in regard to the 
material universe which was contrary to the established 
doctrine of the church, as it was supposed to have been 
derived from the Bible, but which has been subse- 
quently universally admitted to be in entire accordance 
with all the teachings of revelation. No man now 
holds that the Bible teaches the Ptolemaic system of 
the universe ; no infidel now insists that the believer 
in revelation shall be held to maintain that that system 
is taught in the Bible. The writings of all infidels 
might be searched in vain for an objection to the Bible 
drawn from that source; and no objector to the Bible 
would risk his own reputation in urging such an 
objection. 

It is impossible for any objector to the Bible to 
demonstrate that all the arguments now derived from 
the recent and as yet imperfect science of geology 
against the statements of the Bible, may not yet take 
their place with the objections which could have b^en 
urged as derived from the new doctrine of astronomy 
in the time of Galileo ; or that the real difficulty in re- 
gard to the doctrines of geology as coming into alleged 
conflict with the Bible, may not be a difficulty, not in 
the science itself, or in the Bible when fairly inter- 
preted, but in the interpretations heretofore affixed to 
the Bible, and received as the undisputed doctrines of 
the church. The process of adjustment, in such a case, 



60 THE FOUNDATION" OF FAITH 

will consist essentially of two things : first, in ascertain- 
ing exactly what the science is; and secondly, in ascer- 
taining precisely what the Bible teaches. If these 
points are clearly ascertained, then, and not till then, 
will the time have come for the inquiry whether the 
statements of the two are harmonious. No friend of 
the Bible can assume that the alleged disclosures of 
geology in regard to the duration of the world, and the 
history of extinct races of animals, are false; and no 
geologist can assume that the interpretation affixed to 
the Bible hitherto in the church is the true one, and 
that he has overthrown the authority of the Bible when 
he has shown that the disclosures of geology are con- 
tradictory to that current interpretation. Such assump- 
tions, in regard to astronomy, would have determined 
nothing in the time of Galileo ; such assumptions in 
regard to geology would determine nothing now. It 
is still quite competent for the friend of the Bible to 
reopen the question as to its meaning; and he should 
be allowed, in respect to the disclosures of geology, and 
to all other sciences, as in the case of the revelations 
of the telescope, the most ample opportunity for insti- 
tuting the inquiry as to the fair interpretation of the 
book which he regards as a revelation from God. 

(3) If it be asked, then, how far the teachings of a 
revelation from God would modify the teachings of 
science, the following remarks will furnish a correct 
answer to the inquiry: — 

(a) Such a revelation will in no way modify the facts 
of science. These are what they are : they are what 
are disclosed as such by the fair application of the 
principles of scientific investigation. They are not to 
be set aside — they cannot be set aside, by any revela- 



IN THE WOED OF GOD. 61 

tion from heaven. The friend of revelation is not to 
require that they shall be set aside or rejected. He is 
not in any way to ask that they shall be modified, or 
that their disclosures shall be made to bend to the 
teachings of the book which he regards as a revelation. 
He is to admit them to be true, whatever may be their 
bearing on the book which he regards as a communica- 
tion of the divine will. He is to allow every fair 
statement in regard to such disclosures, and every fair 
inference from them. He is to suffer them to strike 
where they will, and whatever may be the effect on the 
system which he holds. 

(b) On the other hand, he may insist on two 
things : — 

He may demand that the facts of science which are 
alleged to come into conflict with the teachings of reve- 
lation shall be fully ascertained. They must not be 
fancy, theory, conjecture, nor must a conclusion, unfa- 
vorable to revelation, be drawn from them where they 
are imperfectly developed. He may urge this point to 
the utmost; he may demand the most rigid demonstra- 
tion of the truth of the facts that are alleged to be in 
conflict with revelation, and may insist on a suspension 
of the judgment until the science shall be settled and 
clearly understood. 

He may, also, insist on the privilege of re-examining 
the interpretation of the book of revelation, and insti- 
tute the inquiry whether the interpretation which has 
been affixed to the book is the true interpretation, and 
whether, in the fair use of language, the teachings of 
the book may not be consistent with the teachings of 
science. That was the point where the church should 
have paused in the case of Galileo, and that may be 



62 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

demanded now. The friend of science should concede 
that as a true principle ; the friend of revelation should 
admit that if, after the fullest and fairest inquiry, the 
two cannot be made to harmonize, the book which he 
has regarded as a revelation cannot be from God. 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 63 



CHAPTER III. 

THE STATEMENTS OF THE BIBLE IN VIEW OF THESE 
PRINCIPLES. 

The principles which have been laid down in the 
preceding chapters are such as, it must be presumed, 
will commend themselves to all men; and they are 
undoubtedly such as the world will act on in determin- 
ing the claims of a pretended revelation from God. If 
a book should now for the first time be published to 
the world, asserting a claim to be a revelation from 
God, it would, beyond all doubt, be subjected to these 
tests; and if the book now received by the Christian 
world as a revelation from God is to retain the hold 
which it now has on the human mind, and is ultimately 
to obtain a universal belief among mankind that it is 
from God, it must be shown that it meets the demands 
implied in the principles which have been stated. 

One of the most important inquiries, therefore, before 
the world, is whether the Bible does, in fact, meet these 
demands. This inquiry is practically suggested in all 
cases in which the Bible is proposed to man as a guide 
to heaven ; it comes before the minds of men in all 
scientific investigations ; it is publicly asked by avowed 
sceptics, and it is secretly before the minds of multi- 
tudes of men who have no desire to be known as scep- 
tics ; it is always asked when new discoveries in science 



64: THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

are submitted to the world, and it enters into all the 
inquiries about what the Bible sanctions or disapproves 
in morals. Whenever and wherever it is alleged by 
the friends of the Bible that it declares that to be truth 
which, the scientific world declares to be false; when- 
ever and wherever it is alleged that it authorizes a 
course of conduct which the world has pronounced to 
be wrong, just so much is done to create and sustain 
infidelity : to throw off, on the one hand, one class of 
men, and on the other, another, and to render it impos- 
sible to convince either that the book can be from God. 
Perhaps a more essential service, therefore, could not 
be rendered to the cause of truth, than by the inquiry 
whether the Bible, according to the principles laid 
down in the previous chapters, does commend itself to 
the world as being in accordance with the ascertained 
facts of science, with the fundamental laws of our nature, 
and with the convictions in regard to right and wrong 
which God has enstamped on the human soul. 

This might open a very large field of inquiry, for it 
might lead to an examination of all the historical state- 
ments, all the statements on the subject of morals, and 
all the statements that have any bearing on the subjects 
of science, to be found in the Bible. Few men would be 
competent to such an examination ; and yet, if a man 
were competent to it, it may be doubted whether he 
could perform a more important service for the world 
than by such an examination. There are few more 
inviting fields, now unoccupied, for a man who would 
wish to render a valuable service to the world, than 
this. The world has not yet furnished the man that is 
qualified for this: the man who should combine in 
himself the highest amount of Biblical knowledge 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 65 

with the highest attainments in mental and moral sci- 
ence, and in the great departments of the physical 
sciences which distinguish this age. 

A few thoughts may, however, be suggested as show- 
ing, at least, how far the Bible recognizes the propriety 
of appealing to these principles, and as showing that, 
thus far, these principles have not come in conflict with 
the claims of the Bible as a book of revealed truth. 

§ 1. The Bible appeals to the reason of mankind. 

The meaning of this statement is, that the Bible 
recognizes the doctrine that man is capable of judging 
of truth, or that there are principles of truth, lying 
back of its own revelations, to which it appeals, and 
on which it relies in presenting itself to be received by 
mankind as a revelation from God; in other words, 
there are eternal truths, not dependent on the mere will 
of God, to which a true revelation will be conformed. 
The Bible does not claim to set up its own decision of 
right and wrong, by ignoring or setting aside all that 
reason teaches, or by supposing that there is no founda- 
tion for judging of what is true or false, right or wrong, 
in the human soul. 

(a) This appeal the Bible makes, or presumes to be 
made, in such passages as the following (Isa. i. 18): 
" Come, now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord." 
Here the appeal is made directly to the reason of man- 
kind, presuming that there is that in the human mind 
which will appreciate the force of the arguments which 
are suggested (see verses 18, 19, 20), and that those 
arguments will commend themselves to man as sound 
arguments, and as worthy of their attention ; that is, 
it is not assumed in the case that no respect is to be 



66 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

shown to reason; that it is a matter of indifference 
whether a correct or false principle is stated ; that all 
the force of the appeal depends on the fact that God 
has made the statement ; that it is perfectly arbitrary 
with him to make a thing reasonable or unreasonable, 
right or wrong, by a mere statement ; or that there is 
nothing lying back of such a statement which is a pro- 
per ground of appeal. Just the reverse of all this is 
assumed in the appeal. In fact, God assumes this just 
as really as we do when we undertake to reason with 
a sinner, and to show him that he is wrong in his con- 
duct. We assume that he is endowed with reason ; 
that he is capable of appreciating the force of an argu- 
ment ; that the fact that a thing is right or wrong in 
no wise depends, in the case, on our stating it to be so, 
but that there is something back of our statement, in 
the mind itself, or in the nature of things, which makes 
the distinction between right and wrong certain, and 
which lays the foundation for our appeal. 

Thus, also, Paul ' reasoned' with Felix (Acts, xxiv. 
25). He did not merely appeal to authority, not even 
the authority of God. He felt that he was addressing 
one endowed with reason, and capable of appreciating 
an argument addressed to reason. He presumed that 
the commands of God could be so commended to him 
that he would see their propriety, and be led to yield 
to their influence and claims. So, in Isaiah, xli. 21, 
God appeals, by the prophet, to the Hebrew people : 
" Produce your cause, saith the Lord ; bring forth your 
strong reasons, saith the King of Jacob." This would 
be unnecessary and improper, unless it were assumed 
that there is something in man by which he can judge 
of the reasonableness and propriety of the divine deal- 



% 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 67 

ings ; some ground of judgment in regard even to the 
acts of God as conformable, or not conformable, to jus- 
tice and propriety. 

And, in general, it may be observed that the Bible 
is remarkable for its appeals to mankind on the ground 
of the reasonableness of its commands and its doctrines. 
Perhaps no book can be found where this kind of 
appeal is more common, or regarded as more certain. 
God appeals to man to determine whether idols have 
the same claim to homage which he has ; whether his 
claims are just; whether his laws are reasonable, easy, 
proper, equal. 

Now, all this supposes that there is something lying 
back of mere command, which is the ground of the 
appeal ; or that man is so made that he can see what is 
just, and right, and good. If this were not so, then 
all such appeals would be out of place, and would be 
improper. All the appeal which could be made, if this 
were not so, would be, that the fact that God wills a 
thing is all the evidence needed, in any case, that it is 
right, no matter how repugnant it may be to the rea- 
son of mankind. 

The same thing is implied in all the statements in 
the Bible — and they are almost numberless — that God 
is holy; that he is just; that he is good; that he is 
true. What can be the meaning of these statements, 
unless it be assumed that there is holiness, justice, 
goodness, truth, in the nature of things, or apart from 
the mere will of God ? If all the holiness, justice, 
goodness, and truth which there is in the universe, is 
founded on the mere will of God, arbitrarily making a 
thing holy, just, good, and true, then such an appeal 
could have no force. It is, in fact, no more than 



68 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

saying that God is, and what he chooses to make holy 
is holy; what he wills to make just is just; what he 
wills to make good is good ; what he wills to make true 
is true. On that supposition, there is no standard of ap- 
peal in the case, and such an appeal would be, in fact, 
mere illusion. I affirm that my conduct is right. 
According to this supposition, all that I mean by the 
affirmation is that my conduct is what I please, and 
that I choose to make my conduct the standard of 
right. I affirm of another that his conduct is just; 
when asked to explain myself, I answer that all that I 
mean is that his conduct is what he pleases it should 
be, and that, by his own will, he makes any actions which 
he performs, right or wrong, and that his conduct, in 
this particular case, is right, because he has chosen to 
affix the word just to one part of his conduct, and good 
to another, and holy to another. There is no standard 
back of this. There is no general judgment of man- 
kind to which an appeal lies. There is nothing in the 
nature of things which makes one act more true, or 
holy, or just, or good than another, or which makes it 
proper to affix these terms to it : for all depends on the 
mere will of him who performs the act. All that could 
be meant by such an appeal, in regard to God, would 
be, that he has done what he has chosen to do, and that 
the fact that he has done it is a sufficient reason why 
it is right. He has not done it because it is right, but 
it is right because he has done it ; that is, all that there 
is in man which pronounces anything right or wrong ; 
all that he has been made, by the laws of his nature, to 
regard as right or wrong; and all the appeals to him 
based on this, in respect to the character of God, is to 
go for naught : for it is all based on the false assump- 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 69 

tion that there is such a thing as right and wrong in 
the nature of things. Such was not the faith of Abra- 
ham. " Shall not the Judge of all the earth DO eight ?" 
was his language, when he stood before God, and plead 
for guilty Sodom. Gen. xviii. 25. He felt, evidently, 
that there is such a thing as "right," in itself considered. 
He felt assured that the Judge of all the earth would 
do right — that which is right in itself considered, and 
apart from mere will. He felt that what God might 
be about to do (destroying the righteous with the 
wicked) would expose him to the charge of doing that 
which men would regard as wrong, and he made this 
the basis of his argument with his Maker, not that he 
would do a thing, and make it right by his doing it, or 
make that the only ground of vindicating his character, 
but that he would do that which was right and proper 
in itself — which would commend itself to the mind of 
Abraham, and to the minds of men at large, as right 

An expression which will illustrate this thought 
occurs, also, in Jeremiah xiv. 21 : "Do not abhor us, 
for thy name's sake ; do not disgrace the throne of thy 
glory; remember, break not thy covenant with us." 
In this language it is implied that there is a course 
which would be becoming for God, or which would be 
appropriate to his character ; and that there is a course 
which would be unbecoming, dishonorable, and dis- 
graceful to his character. In other words, there must be 
something in man which makes him capable of judging 
what it would be proper for God to do, or something 
lying back of mere will, and different from the mere 
fact that God does it, which would make it right. If 
the mere fact that God does or wills a thing always 
makes it right, then there would be no ground for such 
6 



70 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

a judgment, and no reason for such a plea as that made 
by Jeremiah, since, in that case, the mere fact that 
God does it would preserve his character and doings 
from " disgrace." 

Perhaps no book has ever been written which 
so often and so constantly appeals to the reason of 
mankind as the Bible. It all along assumes that there 
is such a thing as right and wrong in themselves con- 
sidered, and that the laws and requirements of God 
are such as are in themselves right; not that they are 
made right by sovereign will. 

(b) Men argue in the same way about the Bible. 
The friends of the Bible assume that this is a correct 
mode of reasoning, and they probably make many more 
appeals of this kind than any other class of men. 

1. All the evidences of the truth of divine revela- 
tion are based on this idea. The appeal from miracles, 
from prophecy, and from the doctrines of the Bible, 
are appeals to the reason of men, who, in such argu- 
ments, are presumed to be capable of judging in the 
case whether the Bible is such a revelation as it becomes 
God to make, or is reasonable in its claims on mankind. 
If there was no such power of judging, then such 
appeals would have no force; and if the arguments 
addressed to men in favor of the Bible cannot be made 
to commend themselves to reason, even the advocates 
and defenders of the Bible assume that it cannot be 
received by the world. There are none of those de- 
fenders who would attempt to urge men to receive a 
book whose principles and commands were admitted by 
themselves to be unreasonable, nor could they hope or 
expect to be able to convince men that such a book ought 
to be received by mankind. They may attempt to show, 



IN THE WOKD OF GOD. 71 

and they may do it successfully, that many of the state- 
ments in revelation are ahove the reason of mankind, and 
that the statements of a revelation from God may be ex- 
pected to bear this character, and that this fact should 
be no barrier to the reception of the book as a revela- 
tion; but no one would maintain that the statements 
of a revelation from God are to be expected to be 
contradictory to reason, and should not on that account 
be rejected. It is always assumed in all the arguments 
in favor of a revelation, that if the statements in the 
book are contradictory to reason, or are not consistent 
with the best exercise of reason, the book cannot be 
received ; for it is assumed that God is the author of 
reason, and that all the statements which He makes 
must be consistent with the proper exercise of the 
faculties with which He has endowed mankind. 

2. Men preach in this way. They expect to com- 
mend the doctrines which they preach to the reason of 
their hearers, or, at least, to show that they are not 
contradictory to the proper laws of reason ; and if they 
cannot do this, they have no hope of being successful. 
It is their hope and their belief that they may be able 
so to present the doctrines which they preach, that they 
shall appear to their hearers to be reasonable doctrines, 
or, at least, if the positive reasonableness of the doctrines 
cannot be made apparent, that they shall not be un- 
reasonable, or contrary to reason ; and in proportion as 
they can do this, they entertain the hope that their 
doctrines will be received by mankind. They would 
entertain no hope if the doctrines which they preach 
were palpably contrary to reason, or if the arguments 
by which they were sustained were at variance with 
all the rules of logic; and though for the authority of 



72 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

those doctrines, and for their binding obligation, they 
depend on the will of God; and though they promulgate 
doctrines which are above reason, or which reason 
could never have discovered, yet they could have no 
hope of success if their doctrines were a violation of 
the plain dictates of reason, nor could they entertain 
such a hope if they were unable to show that it is rea- 
sonable that man should obey the will of God. All 
this supposes that there is something besides mere will 
— even the will of God — in the case; that there is 
something back of that will which makes that will 
right and proper. If it were not so, then all reasoning 
on the doctrines of religion would be vain and useless ; 
then it would be of no consequence to be able to show 
that it is reasonable to obey the will of God ; then it 
would be a matter of indifference what doctrines were 
inculcated for human belief, provided it were shown us 
that they were the exponents of the will of God ; then 
it would be difficult to see why man was endowed with 
reason, or why he was so made that there would be 
danger that he would regard this as of importance in 
religion. Then, too, it would be difficult to account 
for the fact that God so made the mind of man that he 
naturally employs the aid of reason in judging of the 
subject of religion — since, if it were true that reason 
has nothing to do with religion, or if it were improper 
to make any appeal to it, it would seem that God had 
so made the mind as to lead necessarily to a perpetual 
mistake on the subject, by having so endowed man 
that he naturally supposes that this is a competent tri- 
bunal before which to bring the doctrines of religion. 
Then, also, it would follow that they who should show 
the least deference to reason in their preaching, or 






IN THE WORD OF GOD. 73 

whose doctrines were most difficult to be reconciled to 
reason — that is, most absurd — would be likely to be 
most successful in their preaching ; a maxim which, 
however it may seem to be acted on by many in their 
preaching, would not be likely to be one that would be 
openly avowed. Then, also, it would follow that the 
labor of Butler in the "Analogy," was a useless, if not 
a pernicious labor, for the great object of that immortal 
work is to show that revealed religion is reasonable, 
since it conforms in its great principles to the consti- 
tution and course of nature ; and then, too, it would 
seem that nothing was gained by so endowing President 
Edwards with the power of ratiocination that in this 
respect he should, by common consent, be placed at 
the head of the race, and by inclining him to exert 
those great powers in showing that the doctrines of re- 
vealed religion are conformable to the highest deduc- 
tions of reason, since the whole work which he performed 
proceeded on the supposition that reason is, in some 
way, a proper tribunal before which to bring the doc- 
trines of revealed religion. All the reasoning in Butler 
and Edwards proceeds on the supposition that there 
is a standard of judging distinct from mere will, and 
that the doctrines of revelation commend themselves to 
men because the will of God is conformable to such a 
standard, and may be judged of by reason. 

3. The same thing follows from all the attempts 
which are made to vindicate the character of God. If 
his will is not only the ultimate, but the only standard, 
or, in other words, if it is his will only which makes 
anything right or wrong, then it would seem to be im- 
possible, in any proper sense, to vindicate his character, 
and as needless as it is impossible, since all that would 



74 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

be necessary or proper in the case would be simply to 
show what he is, what he wills, and what he does. For, 
what is it to vindicate & character? It is: " to defend, to 
justify, to support or maintain as true or correct, against 
denial, censure, or objection." — Webster. That is, it is to 
show that what is thus vindicated or defended is worthy 
of confidence as judged by some standard of integrity. 
When we vindicate the character of a lawgiver, it is 
with reference to the constitution under which he acts, 
and the proprieties of his station ; when we vindicate 
the character of a magistrate, it is with reference to the 
law by which he is appointed, and the integrity de- 
manded in his office ; when we vindicate the character 
of a neighbor, it is with reference to some rule of 
morality or propriety in the intercourse of man with 
man. We affirm, in such cases, of a man, that he is 
upright, moral, pure, just, chaste, benevolent, impartial; 
that is, we have an idea of what it is to be upright, 
moral, pure, just, chaste, benevolent, impartial, and we 
judge of him with reference to the conformity of his 
conduct to that standard. What is meant when it 
is said that God is holy? Do men intend to say that 
God, by his mere will, determines a thing to be holy, 
and then simply that his conduct is conformable to his 
own will ? Can this truism be all that is meant when 
men maintain respecting God, or when God affirms of 
himself, that he is holy? What is meant where it is 
affirmed that he is righteous, or that his conduct is just? 
Do men mean that he, by a mere determination of will, 
makes a thing to be righteous or just, and then that his 
own conduct is conformable to what he has been pleased 
to make righteous or just ? Was this all that Abraham 






IN THE WORD OF GOD. 75 

meant when lie said : " Shall not the Judge of all the 
earth do right ?" 

And in vindicating the higher doctrines of Christ- 
ianity — the doctrine of the Trinity, the incarnation, 
the atonement, and the Scripture statement in regard to 
future retribution — do not the friends and advocates of 
those doctrines endeavor to prove that such truths do 
not violate any of the principles of sound reason? 
While they cheerfully admit that they are above rea- 
son, in the sense that reason could not have disco- 
vered them, and that the reason of man is not com- 
petent now, if it will ever be, fully to comprehend 
them, is it ever conceded that they are contrary to 
sound reason? Do not the advocates of those doc- 
trines steadfastly maintain that if the understanding 
of man was sufficiently comprehensive to embrace 
them in the fulness of their meaning, that they would 
be said to be in entire accordance with the princi- 
ples of sound reason? Could they hope or expect 
that they would secure the assent of mankind, if, 
while they are stated to be above reason, they should 
also be admitted to be contrary to reason ? And, in 
particular, in regard to the doctrine of future punish- 
ment — the eternal sufferings of any portion of the 
creatures of God — the most difficult and incompre- 
hensible of all the doctrines of the Bible, do not 
the advocates of that doctrine always maintain that 
there are reasons for the eternal punishment of the 
wicked which will be satisfactory tp the universe when 
they are understood; that if those reasons could be 
seen now the mind would acquiesce in them; and 
that it will be seen hereafter that, fearful as that doc- 
trine is, the character of God, even in inflicting the 



76 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

punishment, is worthy of universal confidence and 
love? We have, in fact, the following statement in 
the Bible itself, in regard to the effect on holy beings 
of the inflictions of God's just judgment on the wicked : 
"I heard a great voice of much people in heaven, say- 
ing, Alleluia ! salvation, and glory, and honor, and 
power unto the Lord our God ; for true and righteous 
are his judgments. And again they said, Alleluia. 
And her smoke rose up forever and ever." — Eev. xix. 
1-3. And in all these attempts to vindicate these 
doctrines; to vindicate the character of God in view 
of these doctrines; to show that these doctrines are con- 
formable to reason, and that the character of God is 
holy, just, and righteous, is it not implied that there is 
something bach of mere will that is an element in judg- 
ing; that there is some standard of what is reasonable 
and right, by which God admits that even his own 
character is to be judged? Has he not made us so 
that it is necessary that the doctrines which he reveals, 
as well as his own conduct and character, shall be seen 
to be conformable to that standard before we can per- 
ceive that he is worthy of confidence and love? Has 
he not so made us that we could not honor him if it 
was seen by us that his character and dealings were in 
violation of those principles which he has made to be 
the standard by which our own minds determine what 
is right? When God appeals to us, and when men 
attempt to vindicate his character, is the ground of 
the appeal and of the vindication, the mere fact that 
God has done what he has done, and that, therefore, it 
is right, or that all that is right in his act is in his 
will; or is it that there is such a thing as right in 
itself, and that we have been so made, after his own 



IN" THE WOKD OF GOD. 77 

image, that we can see and appreciate what is right 
when it is fairly submitted to our understanding? If 
this is not so, what do men mean when they attempt 
to vindicate the character of God ? Certain it is that 
the statements in the Bible are founded on the supposi- 
tion that the laws of God, and the dealings of God, 
can be so presented to the minds of men that they will 
be seen to be right; that they will be seen to be not 
mere expressions of will, but the expressions of eternal 
justice, goodness, and truth. And certain it is that 
whatever men may maintain in regard to the question 
whether there is such a thing as right and wrong in 
the nature of things with which the divine dealings 
will be found to accord, and by which he judges of 
his own conduct, and expects to be judged by others, 
they always proceed on this supposition in all their 
attempts to vindicate God. 

4. It is worthy of serious inquiry what the character 
of God is if this is not so. Let it be assumed that there 
is no such thing as right and wrong in themselves, or 
in the nature of things ; that all this is determined by 
mere will; that that is right which God has made 
right, and that wrong which he has made wrong, and 
that the one is right and the other wrong only because 
he has made them so, and then what, on this supposi- 
tion, is the character of God, and what is the claim 
which he has to the homage, the confidence, and the 
love of the universe which he has made ? 

The following consequences would seem to follow 
inevitably from such an assumption : — 

(a) That of such, a character we know not whether 
it is good or evil ; or rather it is, in fact, neither, since 
all that is to determine whether it is good or evil is in 



78 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

his own will. We cannot apply the terms good or 
evil to such a character, for the terms, in such a case, 
convey no idea. "We can predicate power of such a 
being; we can predicate of him sagacity, wisdom, 
skill ; we can also predicate benevolence, for the ten- 
dency of his acts may be to promote happiness ; but 
how can we predicate right or wrong of such a being; 
or how can we say that his benevolence is a virtue, 
unless it be assumed that there is such a thing as 
right, and that benevolence is a virtue because it is 
right ? 

(b) A malignant being might be all that would be 
implied in the idea under consideration. If clothed 
with absolute authority and power, he might deter- 
mine, by an act of will, that his own deeds were right ; 
that his will was the standard, and that the good or 
evil of all acts was to be determined by that will. If, 
for example, the laws of such a being were just the 
reverse of what the laws of God are, it is impossible to 
see, on the supposition now under consideration, how 
they could be disapproved of by mankind, or how 
they could be regarded as wrong, since, by the sup- 
position, all that there is of moral character in such 
acts and laws is determined solely by the will of the 
being himself. 

(c) In such a case, also, there would be a jar or dis- 
crepancy between our nature as God has made us, and 
the conclusion which we should be compelled to come 
to respecting himself. There can be no doubt that we 
have been so made that we are under a necessity of 
believing that there is such a thing as right and wrong, 
or that the human mind, when it acts freely, comes to 
this conclusion ; and there can be as little doubt that 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 79 

we have been so made as to apply this mode of judging 
to the acts of our Maker as well as our own ; in other 
words, to judge him and his doings by this as a stand- 
ard. The considerations which have been suggested 
above seem to be conclusive on this point. If this be 
true, then it would follow that he has so formed us that 
there is a jar or discrepancy which he has himself 
made between what is true and what, by the laws of 
our nature, we are so constituted as to regard as true ; 
that is, he has so made us that we apply this rule of 
judging to all things, even to his own character and 
acts, while, in fact, there is no such thing in existence. 
There is no right and wrong such as we assume in our 
judgments, and the supposition that there is is a mere 
fallacy. Why God should have made us so, would 
then be a grave matter of consideration. Why he has 
so constituted us that we should pass through this world 
at least under a constant illusion — a practical falsehood 
— would be a problem that would perplex us more 
than any of the existing facts in the other supposition. 
What confidence we should have in such a being, or 
why we should exercise any confidence in him, would 
be questions which, indeed, it might be easy to solve, 
but the solution would cast a darker shadow over the 
universe than has been thrown over it by what we are 
now constrained to regard as sin, as evil in itself and 
evil in its tendency. If there is anything on which the 
human mind is perfectly settled and firm in its conclu- 
sions, it is that the interpretations which it is designed 
by our constitution that we shall put on the acts of 
our Maker, are such as are in accordance with truth, 
or that they give a fair exposition of his character. 
What he meant should be regarded as true is not 



80 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

falsehood; what he has made us to regard as right 
cannot be wrong. 

(d) Further ; on the supposition now under conside- 
ration, we should not know what we worshipped. We 
approach God now, taught by all the constitutional 
laws of our being, as a God of holiness, justice, truth, 
goodness, mercy, meaning by those terms all that they 
naturally and properly convey. We suppose that they 
do mean something ; that they mean all that can be 
understood to be implied in them. In the most abso- 
lute and unconditional sense, we feel that God is hory, 
just, true, good, and merciful. Our feelings in our 
worship are not distracted and divided by such ques- 
tions as these : whether these terms mean anything ; 
whether all that there is in the case is not the mere 
result of will; whether we have not mistaken the 
proper interpretation to be put on the acts of our 
Maker; and whether all that we have heretofore 
regarded as reality is not, in fact, mere illusion ; that 
all this is the appointment of mere will — a will which 
might have made just the reverse of these things to be 
proper and right if God had chosen that it should be 
so. 

Who could houor such a God ? How true in such 
a case, in reference to all those who now desire to 
worship the true God, would be the declaration of the 
Saviour in regard to the Samaritans : " Ye worship ye 
know not what." — John iv. 22. 

But the God of the Bible is not such a God. He is 
a God who is holy, and just, and true, and good, and 
merciful ; a God, the Judge of all the earth, who does 
" right" (Gen. viii. 25) ; " a God of truth and without 
iniquity, just and right IS HE." — Deut. xxxii. 4. 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 81 

§ 2. The Bible appeals to the conscience or moral sense 
of mankind. 

The meaning of this proposition is, that the Bible 
presumes that there is a conscience in man, or that he 
is endowed with a capability of judging of right and 
wrong. It is further meant that this power of judging, 
so far, at least, as to be a proper ground of appeal, lies 
back of the direct teachings of revelation, and that 
whatever a revelation may do in enlarging or correct- 
ing the power of judging, it presumes that it, in fact, 
exists in the mind of man. And still further, the 
meaning of the proposition is, that the Bible presumes 
that its own distinct and peculiar revelations on the sub- 
jects of right and wrong will so commend themselves 
to mankind, that they will see that its commands are 
right ; so that they may be made to feel the conscious- 
ness of guilt for not obeying those commands, and so 
that they will approve of them as founded on eternal 
principles of justice. 

In illustration and proof of this proposition, I sub- 
mit the following remarks : — 

(1) The Bible expressly makes this appeal, and 
relies on it as one of the foundations of its hopes of 
success in diffusing its truths. Thus the Apostle Paul 
says (2 Cor. iv. 1, 2): "Therefore, seeing we have this 
ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not: 
but have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, 
not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God 
deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth com- 
mending ourselves to every man's conscience in the 
sight of God." Here it is assumed that there are 
such things as dishonesty and deceit — things that are 
"dark" in their nature or "hidden" — things that will 



82 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

not bear the light of day, and it was with the apostle 
a fixed purpose to renounce all such methods of in- 
fluencing men — never assuming that it is the pro- 
vince of revelation to make that appear right which 
men, in these respects, regard as wrong, or to as- 
sume that men have no correct judgment of what is 
right and wrong. It is assumed further that men have 
a "conscience," even when they have no revelation, and 
that that conscience is competent to pronounce a judg- 
ment on the doctrines of revelation. It is assumed 
further that the true way of meeting the demands of 
such a conscience is to be found in "the manifestation 
of the truth" And it is further assumed that " truth" — 
the revealed truth of God — even the highest and 
the holiest of the truths which He has revealed — can 
be so presented to the minds of men as to secure the 
approbation of conscience; that is, so that there shall 
be an entire correspondence between the truths so 
presented and the decisions of conscience as to what 
is right. It is obvious that no such appeal could be 
made on the supposition that there is no such thing as 
right and wrong in themselves considered, or if men 
have no power of any kind of judging of what is 
right or wrong. If right and wrong are determined 
by an arbitrary decree, then it is clear that it would 
be utterly in vain, and wholly improper, to make such 
an appeal as that referred to by the apostle in the pas- 
sage before us ; and it is also clear that, on that sup- 
position, the style and drift of his preaching would 
have been quite different from that implied in this 
passage. The substance of his preaching, in such a 
case, must have been that God may determine, without 
any reference to the nature of things, or the nature of 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 83 

men, what is right, and that he may require that that 
shall be received as right, however it may appear to 
man. In such a case the last thing that would be 
done would be to make an appeal to the moral sense 
of mankind. 

A similar passage occurs in 2 Cor. vi. 4. " In all 
things approving [marg. commending'] ourselves as the min- 
isters of God:" that is, by showing to mankind that we 
pursue such a course of life as they must see to be in 
accordance with what the ministers of religion should be 
— to wit, " by pureness, by knowledge, by long suffering, 
by kindness, by the Holy Ghost, by love unfeigned, by 
the word of truth, by the power of God, by the armor 
of righteousness :" vs. 6, 7. Here it is assumed that 
there is a course of life which men must perceive to be 
proper for the ministers of religion ; a course of life in 
reference to which they form a judgment from the 
promptings of their nature ; a course which is fit in 
itself, and which it is reasonable for men to expect and 
demand in those who claim to be ministers of a re- 
vealed religion. 

A passage of similar import occurs in Eomans v. 8 : 
" God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while 
we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." That is, he 
appeals to us in proof that that was a proper expression 
of love; that it was such an act as love would suggest, 
and such as ought to meet the approval of mankind. 
It is assumed here that men are endowed with the 
faculty of judging what is proper and right as an ex- 
pression of love, and that all that is demanded in such 
an expression was found in the act of God in giving His 
Son to die for men when they were yet sinners. There 
was that which, in the nature of things, was demanded 



84 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

as the proper expression of love, and all this was found 
in the work of redemption. 

A statement similar to those just made, and confirming 
the inferences drawn from them, occurs in Eomans ii. 
14, 15 : "When the Gentiles, which have not the law, 
do by nature the things contained in the law, these 
having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which 
show the work of the law written in their hearts, their 
conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts 
the meanwhile accusing, or else excusing one another." 
In this passage, all that has been affirmed in the 
previous pages on the point now under consideration, 
is implied. It is supposed that men have a conscience, 
or that they are endowed with a power of judging of 
right and wrong ; it is assumed that there is such a thing 
as right and wrong independently of the revealed will of 
God ; it is assumed that their conviction of what is 
right has to them with propriety the force of law ; it 
is assumed that these things accord with the revealed 
law of God; and, of course, it is assumed that the 
revealed law or will of God will commend itself to 
their consciences, or will be such as they will approve. 
It is supposed, moreover, that this law is so uniform in 
its operations among the Gentiles, even amidst all the 
errors which prevail, as to show that it has its founda- 
tion in the nature of man, and is not dependent on 
local laws and local legislation. In other words, there 
is something in man everywhere which responds to the 
notions of right and wrong, and which, as it approves 
of right as far as it is known, it is to be presumed will 
approve of right when its higher claims are disclosed 
by revelation. The sadness of the condition in the 
heathen world was not that they did not understand 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 85 

the distinction between right and wrong, or that they 
did not know what was right, but it was that they did 
that which they knew to be wrong, or which their 
own consciences condemned. 

A similar passage also occurs in Phil. iv. 8. "What- 
soever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, 
whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, 
whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of 
good report ; if there be any virtue, and if there be 
any praise, think on these things." Here it is assumed 
that there are things which in their own nature are 
true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report; 
that there is such a thing as virtue, and that there are 
things which are deserving of praise or commendation, 
and these are presented as objects of pursuit by all 
true Christians. There is a standard of right and 
wrong. It is not a mere arbitrary standard made by 
revelation. There are things which men universally 
approve as true, and just, and pure, and lovely; and 
these, whatever other virtues Christians may have, 
should be found in their own character, as commend- 
ing their religion to their fellow men. 

(2) The point here stated is assumed by all who 
attempt to defend the Bible. They endeavor to show 
that the precepts of the Bible are such as are adapted 
to meet the approbation of conscience, and that they 
ought to meet that approbation. They endeavor to 
prove that, while, in very many respects, the precepts 
of the Bible are in advance of the disclosures of duty 
made by conscience, up to the point where disclo- 
sures are made, conscience and the Bible harmonize, 
and that the higher disclosures are but carrying out 
the same principles. They endeavor to demonstrate 
7 



86 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

that the precepts of the Bible meet the demands of 
conscience, and that they are such as, being obeyed, 
would produce in the highest degree the happiness of 
men. 

This argument will be found in all the works which 
are designed to enforce the laws of the Bible, and in 
all the books on morality which are founded on the 
authority of that book. A man would not seriously 
set himself to write a book in defence of the Bible if, 
in order to his undertaking, it was necessary to admit 
that the precepts of the Bible are a violation of the 
convictions of men in regard to natural justice, truth, 
probity, chastity, honor, and honesty, and if, in order 
to his argument, it was necessary to show that the 
views usually entertained on those subjects are false, 
and are to be set aside in the purest system of morals. 

The Bible makes its way among men, and sustains 
its hold on society as it advances in intelligence and 
morality, because its precepts commend themselves to 
the moral sense of mankind. It is not so much by 
abstract argument; it is not so much because men 
always have before their minds distinctly the recollec- 
tion of the argument from miracles and prophecy ; it 
is because men see the truth and beauty of the moral 
precepts of the book itself, and because those precepts 
commend themselves to them as true, and useful, and 
good. 

(3) As a matter of fact, the precepts of the Bible do 
thus commend themselves to mankind. The grounds 
of objection to the Bible have never, to any extent, 
been drawn from its moral precepts. In fact, those 
precepts have gone into the legislation, and the busi- 
ness arrangements of the world, and are admitted by 



IN THE WOED OF GOD. 87 

the great mass of mankind to be the true foundation 
of morals. The laws in the Decalogue; the command 
to love God and our neighbor; the injunctions requir- 
ing us to be meek, gentle, pure, benevolent, chaste, for- 
giving; the rules laid down in the Bible relating to pa- 
rents and children, husbands and wives, masters andserv- 
ants ; the precepts respecting the proper treatment of the 
poor and needy, the down-trodden and the oppressed, 
the widow and the fatherless, the stranger and the pri- 
soner, are such as all men must and do approve. They 
commend themselves to them as in entire accordance 
with those great principles of morality which have 
been engraven on their nature, and as being adapted 
to promote the highest interests of society. Every 
man must see and admit that if those directions were 
obeyed by all men, the world would at once put on a 
new aspect, and that peace and happiness would be 
diffused over the globe. 

It is true that not a few of these rules when they 
were given were in advance of the prevailing opinions 
and customs of the world. It is true, for example, 
that the commands in the New Testament forbidding 
revenge, and enjoining the forgiveness of injuries, were 
at first in conflict with many opinions which then pre- 
vailed, and many of the arrangements in society, for 
many of the customs of the world had been formed 
on the supposition that revenge should be taken, and 
that an enemy should not be forgiven ; but it is true 
also that society, in its progress, has come up to these 
precepts, and that the customs of the world are more 
and more shaping themselves to the doctrines of the 
New Testament on these points. Society will yet ad- 
just itself into entire conformity with those rules. 



88 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

It is, however, to be admitted that some of the com- 
mands of the Old Testament have been made a ground 
of objection to the Bible, as being irreconcilable with 
the injunctions of the New Testament, or with just 
principles of morality. The most prominent instances 
of this nature would probably be the command to 
Abraham to offer his son in sacrifice; and the command 
to the invading Hebrews to exterminate the inhabi- 
tants of the land of Canaan. It may be proper to con- 
sider how far these should be regarded as constituting 
an objection to the Bible. 

Mr. Newman, in his work on the "Soul," affirms that 
in many cases the Bible sanctions, and even enjoins, 
things which shock his moral sense as flagrantly im- 
moral, and that he must, therefore, reject the Bible. He, 
in different places of his work, gives three instances : 
the assassination of Sisera, by the wife of Heber ; the 
command to Abraham to sacrifice his son; and the 
extermination of the Canaanites. The first of these 
certainly may be laid out of the account, as there is 
no evidence that God authorized the assassination, and 
there is as little evidence that he has expressed any 
approbation of it as there is that he did of the murder 
of Uriah by David. The second and third instances 
deserve a more formal notice, as it is presumed, from the 
fact that these cases are selected, that they are the most 
difficult, and as the principles of explanation to be 
applied to them would eventually meet all the instances 
in the Bible. 

In reference to the latter of these two — the command 
to exterminate the inhabitants of Canaan — it may be 
remarked (a) that the command is expressly placed on 
the ground of the amazing depravity of those nations, 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 89 

as if the cup of their iniquity was full ; (b) that what 
actually occurred was attended with no more horror 
or suffering than what actually occurs on the earth as 
a consequence of storms, earthquakes, plagues, and 
famines ; (c) that it is no real ground of objection to 
the character of God that he gives command to storms, 
and plagues, and famines, to sweep away, amidst scenes 
of vast suffering, men, women, and children by thou- 
sands and tens of thousands ; (d) that it is difficult to 
see why a command might not with the same propriety 
be given to men to execute such a work of justice ; (e) 
that it is no reflection on the character of an executive 
of a government that he issues a warrant to a sheriff 
for the execution of a man convicted of crime, or for 
the sheriff to carry the command into execution ; (/) 
that the commands in question were in no sense a de- 
parture from what was understood at the time to be 
proper in war; and (g) that those commands were not 
given as a general rule in the treatment of other na- 
tions, but as a special rule in reference to those who 
had become incorrigibly wicked, and whom God had 
resolved to remove from the earth. It is difficult to 
see how that command can be objected to, unless the 
objection shall be made to lie also against God's right 
to dispose of wicked nations, and against what he 
actually does in sweeping off by other than human 
agents vast multitudes of people — people of either sex, 
the aged, the helpless, and the young, in the horrors 
of conflagration, shipwreck, pestilence, and famine. If 
a man will make the trial, he will see that it may be 
as easy to vindicate the character of God in respect to 
the one as in respect to the other : and admitting that 
that was a special case, and not designed for the gene- 



90 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

ral direction of mankind, it will be easy to see that 
the precepts of the Bible in regard to peace, and 
the forgiveness of enemies, and the treatment of the 
aged, the feeble, and the helpless, are such as commend 
themselves to all men as in accordance with every sen- 
timent of humanity and justice. 

In one word, the case must be considered just as it is 
represented in the Bible. It is not a general command 
to make war; it is not an injunction to inflict cruelty 
on enemies in general ; it is not a rule which can be 
alleged by one who is disposed to invade an unoffend- 
ing people ; it is a command to inflict punishment on a 
specified people of eminent wickedness, and ON ACCOUNT 
of their wickedness, and FOR NO other CAUSE : a com- 
mand as specific as a death-warrant, addressed to a 
sheriff, in respect to a man convicted of murder, or as 
specific as we may suppose his command is to earth- 
quakes, to storms, to the pestilence, to sweep off the 
aged, and the helpless, and the harmless, in horrors 
more deep, more dreadful, and more prolonged than 
those of war. For anything that appears to the con- 
trarjr, a sheriff* might, with just as much propriety, urge 
the fact that a death-warrant has been directed to him 
against a convicted murderer, as authority for inflicting 
indiscriminate vengeance on all classes of men, as any 
one now could urge the command to exterminate the 
Canaanites as justifying offensive war; or an objector 
might argue, with just as much propriety, that the laws 
of the United States, or of England, are such as to 
"shock the moral sense of mankind," because they di- 
rect such a death-warrant to an executioner, as to draw 
a similar inference in regard to the character of God 
from the command to exterminate the Canaanites. 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 91 

In reference to this command, the following remarks 
by the author of the Eclipse of Faith (pp. 149, 150, 151, 
152, 153), seem to me to be so forcible that I copy 
them. They show that the objection should have a 
higher range than it has when levelled against the 
Bible ; that it is, in fact, an objection against the actual 
government of the world, and, therefore, is not one 
with which the defender of the Bible has any peculiar 
concern. 

" Now, whether the Bible represents God, or not, in 
all these cases, as sanctioning the things in question, I 
shall not be at the pains to inquire, because I am will- 
ing to take it for granted that Mr. Newman's repre- 
sentation is perfectly correct. I only think that he 
ought, in consistency, to have gone a little further. 
Let him defend, as in perfect harmony with his * intui- 
tions' of right and wrong, the undeniably similar 
instances which occur in the administration of the 
universe; or, if it be found impossible to solve those 
difficulties, let him acknowledge either that our sup- 
posed essential ' intuitions' of moral rectitude are not 
to be trusted, as applicable to the Supreme Being, and 
that, therefore, the argument from them against the 
Bible is inconclusive ; or, that no such being exists ; or, 
lastly, that He has conferred upon man an intuitive 
conception of moral equity and rectitude — of the just 
and the unjust — in most edifying contradiction to his 
own character and proceedings ! 

" Here Fellowes broke in : — 

" 'If, indeed, there be any such instances; but I think 
Mr. Newman would reply that they will be sought for 
in vain in the 'world,' however plentiful, as I admit 
they are, in the Bible.' 



92 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

" 'I know not whether he would deny them or not/ 
said Harrington; 'but they are found in great abun- 
dance in the world, notwithstanding, and this is my 
difficulty. If Mr. Newman were the creator of the 
universe, no question, none of these contradictions 
between 'intuitions' within and stubborn 'facts' with- 
out, would be found. He has created a God after his 
own mind ; if he could but have created a universe 
also after his own mind, we should, doubtless, have 
been relieved from all our perplexities. But, unhap- 
pily, we find in it, as I imagine, the very things which 
so startle Mr. Newman in the Scriptural representations 
of the divine character and proceedings. Is he not, 
like all other infidels, peculiarly scandalized that God 
should have enjoined the extermination of the Canaan- 
ites ? and yet does not God do still more startling things 
every day of our lives, and which appear less startling 
only because we are familiar with them — at least, if 
we believe that the elements, pestilence, famine, in a 
word, destruction in all its forms, really fulfil his bid- 
ding? Is there any difference in the world between 
the cases, except that the terrible phenomena which we 
find it impossible to account for are on an infinitely 
larger scale, and in duration as ancient as the world — 
that they have, in fact, been going on for thousands of 
weary years, and, for aught you or I can tell, and as 
Mr. Newman seems to think probable, for millions of 
years? Does not a pestilence or a famine send thou- 
sands of the guilty and the innocent alike — nay, thou- 
sands of those who know not their right hand from 
their left — to one common destruction ? Does not God 
(if you suppose it his doing) swallow up whole cities 
by earthquake, or overwhelm them with volcanic 



IX THE WORD OF GOD. 93 

fires? I say is there any difference between the cases, 
except that the victims are very rarely so wicked as 
the Canaanites are said to have been, and that God in 
the one case himself does the very things which he 
commissions men to do in the other? Now, if the 
thing be wrong, I, for one, shall never think it less 
wrong to do it one's self than to do it by proxy. ' 

" 'But,' said Fellowes, rather warmly, for he felt 
rather restive at this part of Harrington's discourse, 
'it is absurd to compare such sovereign acts of inexpli- 
cable will on the part of God with his command to a 
being so constituted as man to perform them.' 

" 'Absurd be it,' said Harrington, 'only be so kind 
as to show it to be so, instead of saying so. I maintain 
that the one class of facts are just as ' inexplicable,' as 
you call it, as the other, and only appear otherwise 
because, in the one case, we daily see them, have 
become accustomed to them, and what is more than all, 
cannot deny them, which last we can so promptly do in 
the other case, for Moses is not here to contradict us. 
But I rather think that a being constituted morally 
and intellectually like us, who had never known any 
but a world of happiness, would just as promptly deny 
that God could ever perform such feats as are daily 
performed in this world ! I repeat that, if, for some 
reasons ('inexplicable,' I grant you), God does not mind 
doing such things, he is not likely to hesitate to enjoin 
them, for reasons perhaps equally inexplicable. I say 
perhaps, for, as I compare such an event as the earth- 
quake in Lisbon, or the plague in London, with the 
extermination of the Canaanites, I solemnly assure you 
that I find a greater difficulty, as far as my 'intuitions' 
go, in supposing the former event to have been effected 



94: THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

by a divine agency than the latter. If we take the 
Scripture history, we must at least allow that the race 
thus doomed had long tried the patience of Heaven by 
their flagrant impiety and unnatural vices ; that they 
had become a centre and a source (as we sometimes 
see collections of men to be) of moral pestilence, in the 
vicinage of which it was unsafe for men to dwell ; that, 
as the Scriptures say (whether truly or falsely I do not 
inquire), they had ' filled up the measure of their ini- 
quities.' Let this be supposed as fictitious as you please, 
still the whole proceeding is represented as a solemn 
judicial one; and, supposing the events to have oc- 
curred just as they are narrated, it positively seems to 
me much less difficult to suppose them to harmonize 
with the character of a just and even beneficent being, 
than those wholesale butcheries which have desolated 
the world, in every hour of its long history, without 
any discrimination whatever of innocence or guilt; 
which, if they have inflicted unspeakable miseries on 
the immediate victims, have produced probably as 
much, or more, in the agony of the myriad myriads of 
hearts which have bled or broken in unavailing sorrow 
over the sufferings they could not relieve. Such things 
(I speak now only of what man has not, in any sense, 
inflicted) are, in your view, as undeniably the work of 
God as is the extermination of the Canaanites, accord- 
ing to the Bible. Why, if God does not mind doing 
such things, are we to suppose that he minds, on some 
occasions, ordering them to be done, unless we suppose 
that man (delicate creature) has more refined intui- 
tions of right and wrong, and knows better what they 
are, than God himself? Now, Mr. Newman and you 
affirm that, to suppose God shotild have enjoined the 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 95 

destruction of trie Canaanites, is a contradiction of our 
moral intuitions, and that, for this and similar reasons, 
you cannot believe the Bible to be the word of God. I 
answer that the things I have mentioned are in still 
more glaring contradiction to such 'intuitions,' than 
which none appears to me more clear than this : that 
the morally innocent ought not to suffer ; and I there- 
fore doubt whether the above phenomena are the work 
of God. I must refuse, on the very same principle on 
which Mr. Newman disallows the Bible to be a true 
revelation of such a Being, to allow this universe to 
be so. In equally glaring inconsistency is the entire 
administration of this lower world with what appears 
to me a first principle of moral rectitude, namely, that 
he who suffers a wrong to be inflicted on another, when 
he can prevent it, is responsible for the wrong itself. 
The whole world is full of such instances.' " 

The command addressed to Abraham to offer his son 
as a sacrifice, is a difficulty of a similar character, but 
of a higher kind. It would be said that the command 
is a violation of all the instinctive feelings of our nature; 
that it enjoins the perpetration of what has every where 
been regarded as a crime of the highest character, and 
one most rarely committed even by depraved men — the 
murder of a son ; that we are even shocked at what 
has been regarded as the rigid Roman virtue of Brutus 
who presided on the trial of his son, and condemned 
him to death ; that there could he no sufficient evidence 
furnished to Abraham that a command to do this came 
from God ; that so strong is the instinctive feeling of 
love to a child implanted in our very nature, and so 
universal is that feeling, that Abraham should have at 
once rejected any supposed command to imbrue his own 



96 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

hand in the blood of his son as illusory; and that men 
ought not to receive a book as a revelation from God, 
in which there occurs a command so shocking to the 
purest feelings, the holiest instincts, and the best " in- 
tentions" of mankind. 

As this case is undoubtedly the strongest of the kind 
that could be referred to, and as it involves all the dif- 
ficulty that can be found in any case, it may be proper 
to notice it a little more particularly. 

1. The first remark to be made is, that it is important 
to ascertain exactly what the case was, and the objections 
should be considered in view of the exact case, for an 
objector has no right to go beyond that, or to include 
in his objection anything which does not properly be- 
long to the case. The facts, then, are these: — 

First. The command given to Abraham was a special, 
not a general command. It was addressed to him, and 
to no other. It related to that time, and to that son, 
and to no other time and to no other son. It was not 
a general rule in regard to his authority over his chil- 
dren ; it would not have justified him in a similar 
treatment of another son; nor would it justify another 
parent in the same treatment of a child. It was not in 
itself so general, nor did it involve any principle so 
general, that it could be a guide in any other case, and 
it does not, therefore, stand on the same level as the 
general command inwrought into our nature, and con- 
firmed by revelation, to love our children, to protect 
them, to provide for them. 

Second. The command related to his offering him as 
a sacrifice to God, on the principle of devoting to him 
that which was most valued and most valuable. " Take 
now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, 



IN" THE WORD OF GOD. 97 

and get thee into the land of Moriah, and offer him 
there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains 
which I will tell thee of." — Gen. xxii. 3. Whatever 
objection, therefore, may lie against the narrative, it 
can be only in this point of view : not whether a com- 
mand authorizing a parent to take the life of a son for 
any object would be proper, but whether it would be 
proper for God to command a man to offer his son, in 
a specified case, as a burnt-offering. Great as may be 
the difficulties in regard to this, yet this is the difficulty, 
and the only difficulty, and the subject should not be 
encumbered with any additional embarrassment. This 
is at least a simple and a tangible question, whether it 
would be right for God to command a father to devote 
his own son as a sacrifice. 

Third. It is plain that Abraham supposed that Isaac 
would be raised to life again. This might be inferred 
from the very narrative in Genesis; for there was an 
express promise made before this that Isaac should be 
the ancestor of a numerous posterity, and that through 
him all the nations of the earth should be blessed. 
Thus, in Gen. xxi. 12, God is represented as saying to 
Abraham, " In Isaac shall thy seed be called." Comp. 
Gen. xvii. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. As this promise was positive, 
Abraham must have believed that no command from 
God could conflict with it, and he must have inferred, 
therefore, that even if Isaac should be offered in sacri- 
fice, God would raise him up again from the dead. 
But this, which would seem to be so plain as a matter 
of inference, is expressly stated by an apostle to have 
been the fact. " By faith Abraham, when he was 
tried, offered up Isaac ; and he that had received the 
promises offered up his only-begotten son, of whom 



98 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

it was said, that in Isaac shall thy seed be called : 
Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even 
from the dead."— Heb. xi. 17-19. 

Fourth. It is manifest that it was never intended 
that Abraham should be allowed to proceed so far in 
the transaction as actually to imbrue his hands in the 
blood of his son. This is apparent not only from the 
result, or from the fact that he was checked when 
about to slay him, but from the statement which 
accompanies the account of the transaction : " Lay not 
thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything 
unto him, for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing 
that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, 
from me." — Gen. xxii. 12. If there is any difficulty in 
the supposition that God gave a command merely to 
try him, and then revoked the command, that difficulty 
belongs to another subject, and should not be brought 
in here to embarrass the point now under consideration. 
The plain statement is — and that is all that we have 
now to do with — that it was never intended that he 
should be allowed to take the life of his son ; but it 
was meant that there should be the strongest possible 
trial of faith, and that, when the strength of his faith 
was tested, showing that he was willing to sacrifice 
anything that he had to God, and to obey any com- 
mand, however difficult and extraordinary, the com- 
mand should then be revoked. Accordingly, an ar- 
rangement was made, showing conclusively that this 
was the purpose; the arrangement by which a ram, 
caught in the thicket, was substituted for a sacrifice in 
the place of that which Abraham had expected to 
offer. 

These are the sole facts in the narrative, and the 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 99 

Scripture account is to be held responsible only for 
these. 

2. The second point relates to the inquiry whether 
there are any principles which would show that it is 
conceivable that God could give such a command, or 
whether it does not so violate our " instincts," and all 
our convictions of what is right, that it would be im- 
possible for a good man to receive such a command 
and to purpose to obey it. In other words, can a 
revelation be received as from God which contains one 
such command — one direction, issued in a solitary case, 
to offer up a son in sacrifice? This, it must be 
admitted, is a grave and difficult question. 
In reply to this inquiry, it may be remarked, 
(a) That a book pretending to be a revelation from 
God would not be received as such by mankind at large, 
if it contained as one of the principles of religion a 
general rule or law that a son — the first born, for ex- 
ample — was always to be offered in sacrifice. Men are 
undoubtedly so made that they could not believe that 
a command which would so violate all the instinctive 
feelings of their nature could be from the God who is 
the author of that nature. It could not be supposed 
that the same Being had implanted these instincts, and 
made them so tender and universal, and then that, in 
a revelation to mankind, he would make it the duty of 
all men habitually to disregard them. Men must be- 
lieve that the laws of God are in harmony ; and that 
what he has implanted in our very nature will not be 
contradicted in a real revelation of his will. Of two 
systems so diametrically opposed, there could not be 
the same author; one commanding men to love and 
cherish their offering, and the other commanding them 



100 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

to imbrue their hands in their blood. It must be ad- 
mitted, therefore, that if such a command had been 
found in a book purporting to be a revelation from 
God, making it a general rule or requirement that the 
first born was to be offered in sacrifice by the hands of 
a father, it would not have been possible to receive it as 
a revelation from God, any more than it would be pos- 
sible to receive a book as a revelation which should 
command men to commit murder or adultery, or which 
should require children not to honor their father or mo- 
ther, or which should make falsehood and theft a duty. 
If, for example, the doctrine of Mr. Hume, that adultery 
should be practised if men would obtain all the good 
that can be secured in this life, or that it is no more 
evil to turn a few ounces of blood from its accustomed 
channel than any other liquid, and that therefore 
suicide is innocent, were found in such a book, it 
would be impossible for the race to receive it as a 
revelation from God.* 

* Thus Mr. Hume says, in an essay which he said was, "of all 
his writings, historical, philosophical, or literary, incomparably the 
best :" " The long and helpless infancy of man requires the combina- 
tion of parents for the salvation of their young ; and that combina- 
tion requires the virtue of chastity or fidelity to the marriage bed. 
Without such a utility, it will readily be owned that such a virtue would 
never have been thought of." (Philosophical Essays, vol. ii: p. 233. 
Ed. 1817.) Chastity, therefore, according to Mr. Hume, is a matter 
of convenience, not a matter of moral obligation. 

In another place he says : " It is needless to dissemble. The 
consequence of a very free commerce between the sexes, and their 
living much together, will often terminate in intrigue and gallantry. 
We must sacrifice somewhat of the useful, if we be very anxious to 
obtain all the agreeable qualities; and cannot pretend to reap alike 
every advantage. Instances of license daily multiplying will weaken 
the scandal with the one sex, and teach the other by degrees to 



IN THE WOKD OF GOD. 101 

In reference to the matter now under consideration, 
it may be remarked that the principle is undoubtedly 
laid down in the Bible that all things belong to God, 
and that the most choice and valuable of a man's pos- 

adopt the famous maxim of La Fontaine, with regard to female in- 
fidelity, that if one knows it, it is but a small matter; if one knows it 
not, it is nothing." (Quoted by Dr. Magee,in the work on Atonement 
and Sacrifice, p. 427. Ed. 1813.) 

Thus, also, he teaches, in his Essay on Suicide, that " the life of a 
man is of no greater importance than that of an oyster ; and, as it is 
admitted that there is no crime in diverting the Nile or the Danube 
from their courses, so he contends that there can be none in turn- 
ing a few ounces of blood from their natural channel." (Magee on 
Atonement and Sacrifice, p. 429.) 

Mr. Hume's doctrines on the subject of morals are thus summed 
up by Dr. Beattie : "That justice is not a natural, but an artificial 
virtue, dependent wholly on the arbitrary institutions of men, and 
previous to the establishment of civil society not at all incumbent ; 
that moral, intellectual, and corporeal virtues are all of the same 
kind ; in other words, that to want honesty, to want understanding, 
and to want a leg, are equally the obj ects of moral disapprobation, and 
that it is no more a man's duty to be grateful or pious than to have 
the genius of Homer, and the strength and beauty of Achilles ; that 
every human action is necessary, and could not have been different 
from what it is ; that when we speak of power as an attribute of 
any being, God himself not excepted, we use words without mean- 
ing; that we can form no idea of power, nor of any being en- 
dowed with power, much less of one endowed with infinite power ; 
and that we can never have any reason to believe that any object 
or quality of an object exists of which we cannot form an idea ; that 
it is unreasonable to believe God to be infinitely wise and good, 
while there is any evil or disorder in the universe, and that we 
have no good reason to think that the universe proceeds from a 
cause ; that the external material world does not exist, and that if 
the external world be once called in doubt as to its existence, we shall 
be at a loss to find arguments by which to prove the being of a God, 
or any of his attributes ; that those who believe anything certainly 
are fools ; that adultery must be practised, if men would obtain all 

8 



102 THE FOUNDATION" OF FAITH 

sessions should be devoted to God either as a thank- 
offering or as a burnt-offering. Under this principle, 
the first-born of animals, if without blemish, was to be 
offered in sacrifice. Ex. xiii. 2, 12 ; xxii. 29 ; xxxiv. 
19; Num. iii. 13; Deut. xv. 19. This principle, if 
literally carried out, and if there had been no express 
exception, might have led to the inference that the first- 
born of children, if males, should be offered in sacri- 
fice as well as the first-born of animals, for the principle 
that the first-born as such belonged to God, and should 
be devoted to him, was a principle that lay at the 
foundation of the Hebrew economy. In order, there- 
fore, to avoid this conclusion, and to prevent the possi- 
bility of a construction which would be so much at 
war with every instinct of our nature, it was expressly 
required that the first-born son should be 'redeemed' by 
a substitute offered in his place. "And the first-born 
of thy sons shalt thou redeem." — Ex. xxxiv. 20. " Every 
firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb; and 
if thou wilt not redeem it, then thou shalt break his neck : 

the advantages of life; that if generally practised, it would soon 
cease to be scandalous, and that if practised secretly and frequently, 
it would by degrees come to be thought no crime at all; that the 
question concerning the substance of the soul is unintelligible ; that 
matter and motion may often be regarded as the cause of thought ; 
that the soul of man becomes every moment a different being, so 
that the actions I performed last year, or yesterday, or this morn- 
ing, whether virtuous or vicious, are no more imputable to me than 
the virtues of Aristides are imputable to Nero, or the crimes of 
Nero to the man of Ross." {Essay on the Nature and Immutability of 
Truth, by Dr. Beattie,pp. 111-113.) Could a book containing such 
doctrines be received as a divine revelation ? Is there nothing in 
man which would be competent to judge on the question whether 
such a book could be from a pure and holy God ? 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 103 

and all the first-born of man among thy children shalt 
thou redeem." — Ex. xiii. 13. This principle was ulti- 
mately incorporated into the general arrangement that 
the entire tribe of Levi should be substituted in the 
place of the first-born of the whole people, as a tribe 
peculiarly set apart to the service of God. Num. iii. 13. 
Every precaution was, therefore, taken to avoid the pos- 
sible conclusion in the application of a general principle, 
that the first-born son should be offered in sacrifice. 

But does the fact that one such command is found in 
a book professing to be a revelation from God — found 
in the circumstances in which it is found in the Bible ; 
so guarded that it is impossible to regard it as a general 
rule for mankind; so defined that it never has been 
pleaded as an argument for human sacrifice, justify the 
conclusion that the book cannot be from God, or that 
Abraham could not have received them as a command 
of God? 

Let the following facts, then, be borne in mind : (1) 
God is the author of life. (2) He has a right to take 
it away. (3) He actually takes life away ; often, too, 
under forms far more fearful than would have been the 
manner in which Isaac would have died. (4) He issues 
his commands to his agents to take life away : to the 
pestilence; to earthquakes; to storms; to diseases, most 
painful, loathsome, and protracted. He actually asserts 
the right to do this in any way that seems good to Him, 
and informs which we should have said would never have 
occurred under the government of a holy God. (5) If these 
agents were conscious and intelligent, instead of being 
blind and senseless ; if storms and diseases were mew, 
instead of being storms and diseases, the command to 
close life in the manner in which they are required 



104 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

to do it, would be infinitely more shocking to all the 
sensibilities of our nature than was the command to 
Abraham. Suppose that God should issue a command 
to men to inflict on parts of the race all the sufferings 
actually brought upon mankind by the cholera, the 
plague, or the smallpox ; suppose that this command 
should appear to come forth in a manner that could not 
be doubted, men might well stand aghast, and ask whe- 
ther it was possible that such a command could be issued 
by a benevolent God, and whether anything could be 
sufficient to convince them that such a command came 
from Him, and would justify them in going forth to do 
this "strange work." And, if we should conceive that 
the diseases thus commanded to perform this work, and 
the elements of our nature employed in carrying the 
command into execution, were made conscious, might 
we not suppose that they would stand appalled, and 
ask whether it was possible that they should be com- 
manded to execute a work that seemed so much to 
violate all the principles on which we naturally j udge 
of the Maker of the worlds ? The command to Abra- 
ham, in what seems to be severe, harsh, unnatural, 
bears no comparison with the command which actually 
goes forth from the Throne of God each day to cut 
clown the aged and the young — the beautiful and the 
hopeful — the most tender and beloved of all the forms 
of earth — infants, daughters, wives — in the most varied 
and horrid forms of suffering. (6) Another remark 
may be made here. It will not, of course, commend 
itself to one class of men, and it is not of such a nature 
that it could be used in an argument with a sceptic — 
for it would be impossible to demonstrate that it is true, 
and yet it may be true, and in the apprehension of 



IN THE WORD OF GOT). 105 

one who could look at things as they actually are, and 
who could take in the whole case, it might remove 
the entire difficulty. The remark is, that the whole 
transaction may have been connected with the work of 
redemption ; that it may have been, in the estimation 
of Abraham, and in fact, a designed emblematic repre- 
sentation of the great sacrifice afterwards to be made 
for the sins of the world. The most solemn, mysteri- 
ous, and momentous truth connected with the history of 
our world is embodied in the fact — a fact here referred 
to as assumed — that God gave his only Son to be a 
real sacrifice for the sins of the world ; that he himself 
selected him as the victim to make expiation for 
human guilt ; that he surrendered him to death ; that 
he laid on him the iniquities of mankind; and that, 
under the appointment, and in part by the infliction of 
the hand of God his Father, the Redeemer bore such 
an amount of suffering as would be properly expres- 
sive of the value of law, and the evil of violating law. 
This great fact was symbolized by all the bloody sac- 
rifices of the Hebrews, and it may have been — at least 
the contrary cannot be demonstrated — that it was de- 
signed, in the case of the Father of the Hebrew people, 
that that fact should be symbolized to his own mind in 
a more impressive manner than it could be by the 
offering of bullocks or of lambs ; that an event should 
occur in his own history best fitted to impress his 
mind, and the minds of all the Hebrew people for 
ages, with the great truth that God, in the work of 
redemption, would give his own only-begotten Son as a 
sacrifice for the sins of the world; that that would, in 
fact, occur in the work of redemption which Abraham 
was commanded to represent by a symbol. A sceptic 



106 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

cannot assume, much less demonstrate, that the whole 
explanation of the transaction may not be found in 
this fact — and until this is demonstrated, it may be as- 
sumed that there maybe an explanation, corresponding 
entirely with the fact, which would remove the whole 
difficulty. If it was a truth — a truth so exalted and 
mysterious as to tax the faith of the world to the 
utmost — that God would give his Son to be a sacrifice 
for sin — to suffer, to bleed, to die on a cross — it may 
surely be admitted as a possible thing, that such an 
amazing transaction, and one of so much interest to 
mankind, might be symbolized ages before it occurred 
by one event that would stand as much apart from 
the ordinary occurrences of life, as the atonement 
would in fact from the ordinary events of Providence 
in administering the affairs of the world. As the 
atonement made by the death of the Son of God stands 
alone in the history of the universe, it is not incredible 
that there should have been one event in the history 
of mankind so wonderful, so strange, so inexplicable, 
that it should be the fit representative of that which 
was forever thus to stand alone. 

One other remark should be made in reference to 
the question whether the Bible commends itself to 
the conscience or moral sense of mankind. It is, that 
society, in its progress, never gets beyond the injunc- 
tions of the Bible in regard to morals. In fact, it 
never comes up to it. It never reaches a point where 
the injunctions of the Bible on the subject of honesty, 
liberty, benevolence, humanity, courtesy, become ob- 
solete, or fall behind the demands of the age. It is 
still in advance of all the points which men have 
reached; and its injunctions are just as fresh, and 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 107 

as much adapted to the wants of man, as they were 
when the book was formed. The Bible was composed 
in a comparatively rude age of the world, and among 
a people comparatively unlearned. A part of it was 
penned not far from the age of Confucius; all of it 
before the time of Seneca. No small part of it was 
contemporary with the writings of Grecian sages and 
philosophers. Yet none of those writings, not those 
of Confucius, Plato, Seneca, come up to the present 
condition of the world. They could not be made the 
basis of the moral system now demanded in the posi- 
tion which society has assumed. To adopt them, to 
place society so as to be in harmony with them, would 
be to cause the world at once to retrograde some thou- 
sands of years, and to lose at once no small part of 
what it has gained in that long lapse of time. There 
is no plan of benevolence, however exalted in its 
nature, or wide in its aim, in reference to which 
counsel may not be found in the Bible ; there is no 
scheme projected for the promotion of human happi- 
ness, for the extension of liberty, for meliorating the 
condition of the down-trodden and oppressed, to which 
the principles of the Bible are not applicable; and 
there are no laws framed for the protection of human 
rights, for avenging wrong, for advancing the welfare 
of society, the germs or principles of which may not be 
found in the Bible, or which, in reference to purity, 
benevolence, or justice, are in advance of the principles 
laid down in the "Word of God. Books of science, like 
almanacs, become obsolete and useless; those which 
are adapted to one age are not fitted to the progress 
made in subsequent times. In medicine, of what use, 
except as historical records, and as marking the pro- 



108 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

gress of the human mind, are the works of Galen and 
Hippocrates; in geography, of what use, except for 
the same purpose, are the works of Strabo, and Mela ; 
in astronomy, the works of Ptolemy; in chemistry, 
the works of Eoger Bacon, or of the alchemists of the 
middle ages? Who consults the Timseus of Plato 
for an account of the true origin of the universe? 
"Who refers to Aristotle or Pliny for a just and full 
account of Natural History ? As records of truth ; as 
statements of science; as treatises explaining nature, 
these have long since ceased to be referred to, and 
they can never, in these respects, have the value once 
affixed to them. Society has gone beyond them, and 
will never return to the state in which they did really 
mark progress in the race, and contribute to the welfare 
of mankind. So in all the departments of morals, of 
law, and of learning. Our large libraries are filled 
with books which, like the extinct animals of the geo- 
logical periods of the worldj have accomplished their 
purpose, and are now become the 'fossils' of literature 
and science, rarely referred to except by some one curi- 
ous in the history of man, and desirous of knowing what 
the world once was; as the races of the Ichthyosaurians 
and Megastheriums are of value only to those who would 
mark the progressive history of the globe. But society 
has not as yet gone beyond the teachings of the Bible. 
It has never reached a point where the Bible has not 
suggestions to make for the good of man in advance of 
all that has been done or devised. In the highest stages 
of human development thus far reached, it is as fresh 
in its counsels, as original in its instructions, as sug- 
gestive of what will be for the good of mankind, as 
it ever was ; and in all human discoveries, in all that 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 109 

marks the progress of mankind, it goes before the race 
as the Shekinah did before the Hebrew people — a 
pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night. 

§ 3. The Bible in relation to the discoveries of science. 

The subject which is here referred to is too extended 
to admit of being considered in the limits proposed in 
this Essay, even if there were no other considerations 
that would suggest prudence in attempting to dis- 
cuss it. 

A few remarks, of a general character, as illustrating 
the present aspect of science in its relation to revealed 
religion, are all which it is proper for me to attempt 
to make, and all which my design really demands. 
The question, on this point, now before the world, is, 
whether the statements of the Bible are contradictory 
to the disclosures of science? 

(1) Not a few, if not all the sciences, have been 
arrayed against the Bible, and it has been maintained, 
by those who have rejected the Bible, that its state- 
ments are not reconcilable with the disclosures made 
by those sciences. Yet most of the objections from that 
source have been abandoned by infidels themselves. 

Of the objections drawn from the modern astronomy, 
it is enough to say that they were demolished by 
Chalmers. Since the delivery of his celebrated "As- 
tronomical Discourses" we have heard no more of the 
objection, and it will not probably be referred to by an 
intelligent infidel again. At one time, indeed, infi- 
delity claimed that such stupendous plans as the Bible 
refers to, would not have been formed for a world so 
insignificant as is this. Now, it is admitted that no 
argument can be derived from that against revelation, 



110 THE FOUNDATION" OF FAITH 

but that the simple and sole inquiry is, ivhat in fact God 
has done. 

At another time it was held that the account of the 
origin of languages in the Bible was improbable and 
absurd; that the hundreds of languages and dialects 
on the earth could never have had a common origin, 
and that men could have never used the same forms 
of speech. There were some hundreds of languages, 
having, as it appeared, no affinity, no resemblance, no 
appearance of a common source. The account of the 
dispersion on the plains of Shinar was held to be 
ridiculous and improbable: and the book which con- 
tained such an account was held to be incredible. 
"Without any reference to the divine origin of Chris- 
tianity, this vast field of research was entered. Soon 
it was found, to the surprise of those who had entered 
on the investigation, that languages grouped them- 
selves into families, and that the number became in- 
sensibly smaller. New affinities were discovered, and 
new classifications formed. The probability became 
stronger and stronger that there might have been a 
common origin. Sir William Jones supposed that he 
could trace all the languages of the world back to three, 
and subsequently it was found that science furnished 
strong presumption that originally there was but one. 
I can only refer, in a word, to the testimony of two 
distinguished scholars, neither of whom entered on 
the investigation with any intention to confirm the 
authority of the Bible. The first is that of Klaproth. 
He makes no secret of his disbelief of the Mosaic his- 
tory of the dispersion, and tells us that, like many 
other writings of Western Asia, he regards it as a 
mere fable. Yet he says that, in his view, "the uni- 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. Ill 

versal affinity of languages is placed in so strong a 
light, that it must be considered by all as completely 
demonstrated. This," says he, "does not appear ex- 
plicable on any other hypothesis than that of admitting 
fragments of a primary language yet to exist through all 
the languages of the old and new worlds." The other 
witness is Herder, who also says that he regards the 
history of Babel as a "poetical fragment in the Ori- 
ental style." Yet he says, as the result of his inves- 
tigations, that "there is great probability that the 
human race, and language therewith, go back to one 
common stock, to a first man, and not to several dis- 
persed in different parts of the world." His conclu- 
sions do not stop here. He confidently asserts that, 
from the examination of languages, the separation 
among mankind is shown to have been violent; not, 
indeed, that they voluntarily changed their language, 
but that they were rudely and suddenly divided from 
one another.* 

At another time, the Christian world was alarmed at 
the boasted antiquity of the Indies. Astronomical 
tables were discovered that were believed to have been 
formed at least 3500 years before Christ, and it was 
claimed by Bailly that these must be fragments of an 
earlier and far more perfect science. The Christian 
world was alarmed, and infidelity began to sound a 
note of triumph. The result of this may be stated in 
the language of Laplace — himself supposed to have 
no special respect for Christianity — but whose name is 
sufficient to settle a question of this kind. "The origin 
of astronomy," says he, " in Persia and India, is lost, 

* Wiseman's Lectures, pp. 69, 73. 



112 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

as among all other nations, in the darkness of their 
ancient history. The Indian tables suppose a very 
advanced state of astronomy; but there is every reason 
to believe that they can claim no very high antiquity. 11 He 
then proceeds to a detailed examination of the point 
whether the observations supposed by the Indian tables 
were ever actually made, and concludes that those 
tables were not grounded on any true observation, be- 
cause the conjunction which they suppose could not have 
taken place* The objection of infidelity from those 
astronomical tables has been silenced, and will not be 
heard a^ain. 

Simultaneously with this supposed difficulty, arose 
one from the historical records of China and of India. 
The names of long lines of kings were displayed ; ac- 
counts of dynasties were furnished extendiug back 
millions of ages; and it was supposed here that an 
objection was started to the Mosaic narrative which 
would be fatal. Again infidelity triumphed, and the 
friends of Christianity became alarmed. Yet the result 
here has been the same. That result is before the 
world; and the world — infidel and Christian — now 
acquiesces in the conclusion drawn by the laborious 
investigations of Sir William Jones, that on the most 
liberal construction, the existence of an established 
government in the East can be traced back no further 
than 2000 years before the Christian era, the age of 
Abraham, when there was already an established 
dynasty in Egypt, and commerce and literature were 
flourishing in Phoenicia. The Oriental nations have, 
therefore, taken their appropriate place in the history 

* Wiseman's Lectures, p. 237. 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 113 

of the world; and the objection has died away, to be 
heard no more. 

Once more the Christian world was to be alarmed, 
and once more the note of triumph was to be heard 
for a while from infidelity. The materials for the new 
argument which infidelity constructed were found in 
Egypt. u Volney had no hesitation in placing the 
formation of the sacerdotal colleges in Egypt, 13,300 
years before Christ, and calling that the second period 
of their history."* For the antiquity of Egypt, infi- 
delity appealed to the huge and half-buried colossal 
images; to the subterranean temples; to the astronomical 
remains; and to the hieroglyphic legends of that won- 
derful country. In particular, an appeal was made to 
the zodiacs found at Dendera and Esneh, which were 
supposed to represent the state of the heavens at the 
time in which the temples where they were found were 
erected, and which indicated a very remote antiquity. 
At this period God raised np Champollion. He taught 
the world to read the hieroglyphics on the obelisks, 
the tombs, the temples of Egypt. That language, long 
unknown, and whose meaning it was supposed was 
forgotten forever, now disclosed the fact that the cele- 
brated zodiacs extended no further back than the time 
of Nero or Tiberius. On one of the zodiacs he read 
the name of Tiberius, and on the other the name which 
Nero takes on his Egyptian medals. The objections 
from the zodiacs, the pyramids, the tombs, and the 
inscriptions of Egypt, lost their power forever when 
Champollion told the world how to read the inscrip- 
tion on the Eosetta stone, The objections from the 

* Recherch.es, vol. ii. p. 440. 



114 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

antiquity of India and China, and from the diversity 
of languages, have thus died away. Science started 
these objections ; science solved them. The scientific 
world pursued these inquiries as mere matters of in- 
vestigation ; infidelity seized upon the results to give 
alarm ; and again science, of its own accord, removed 
the difficulty. 

(2) The fact that the disclosures of science on any 
subject cannot be reconciled with the common interpre- 
tation of the Bible should not be regarded as proof that 
they are inconsistent with the true doctrine of the Bible 
on the subject. The Bible is not responsible for the 
interpretations that have been affixed to it, though they 
may have seemed to be a fair interpretation, and though 
they may have been regarded as a part of the true faith, 
and as such have received the sanction of synods and 
councils, and have been incorporated with the creeds of 
the Church. It is still, and it always will be, a fair and 
open question whether the Bible has been fairly inter- 
preted, and whether a more accurate knowledge of 
language and customs, and a more correct view of the 
real design of revelation, would not show that the 
statements of the Bible are wholly consistent with all 
the disclosures made by the telescope and by the 
microscope; by all the researches of the geologist, 
and by all the revelations of the laboratory. It can 
never be assumed, on the discovery of a new truth in 
science, that it is against the fair interpretation of the 
Bible, or that it is not possible, by a fair interpretation, 
to make its statements consistent with the disclosures 
of science. The first effect, on the discovery of a truth 
in science that seems to be in conflict with the Bible, 
should be to open the subject of interpretation afresh, 



IN" THE WORD OF GOD. 115 

and to suggest the inquiry whether the Bible has been 
properly understood. This, of course, may lead to 
angry feeling, and to a charge of heresy, as it did to 
persecution in the time of Galileo. It may unavoidably 
give occasion for a temporary triumph of infidelity by its 
assuming that the current interpretation of the Bible is 
the correct one, and by showing, as it may easily be done, 
that the Bible, as thus currently interpreted, is contra- 
dictory to the facts made known by science. It may 
require time to adjust the statements of the two so that 
they shall harmonize; and in the mean time it may give 
occasion for another charge against the Bible that it is 
"a nose of wax," or "a fiddle on which any tune can 
be played," or that it has no doctrines of its own. But 
this is an effect which is inevitable. In due time the 
Bible and the facts will adjust themselves, as has been 
the case on the subject of astronomy. This is what must 
be expected to occur in a book written in a distant age; 
a book not designed primarily to make disclosures on 
this subject; a book in which the statements on this 
subject are incidental, and are necessarily made in the 
common language of men, and not in the strict tech- 
nical language of science. To suppose that this could 
be otherwise, or to demand that it should be otherwise, 
would be to require that a book of revelation should, 
contrary to its main design, adjust all its statements on 
subjects in any way connected with science not to the 
language used in the age in which it is given, but to the 
technical accuracy which will be reached in the highest 
disclosures of science yet to be made to the world ; and 
this would be to demand that it should anticipate in 
science all the discoveries which man could be ever 
expected to make, and this would be, in fact, to make 



116 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

the book as unmeaning as the language of the 
'schoolmen' of the middle ages is now to the mass 
of mankind. It would be also perhaps to make it 
unintelligible to the present objectors to revelation, 
for it is conceivable that the language of science 
may yet, by a fuller and more accurate nomenclature, 
be so modified as effectually to abolish that which 
is now used even by the scientific world. All this 
would be just as reasonable as it would be to require 
philosophers to use the language of science in their 
common modes of discourse, and never again to speak 
of the rising or the setting of the sun, the moon, or 
the stars. 

(3) It is clear that if the Bible is a revelation from 
God, the deductions of science and the statements of 
the Bible cannot be contradictory. They must ulti- 
mately harmonize. God would not make a statement 
in his word which would be contradicted by his works, 
nor cause a fact to occur in his works, the fair inter- 
pretation of which would be contrary to the statements 
of his word. The unbeliever undoubtedly has a right 
to demand that the statements in the Bible should be 
shown, by fair interpretation, to be in accordance with 
all the disclosures of science; and if that cannot be 
done, that the claims of the Bible should be abandoned. 
But, on the other hand, the believer has a right to 
demand that what is alleged as science shall be true 
science ; that the exact facts shall be ascertained ; and 
that it shall be understood that there is no antecedent 
presumption that the two are contradictory. He has 
a right to demand also that the unbeliever shall not 
assume that the interpretations affixed to the Bible, 
though they may have been the current and prevailing 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 117 

interpretation for ages; though they may have received 
the sanction of the 'Fathers,' of synods, and of coun- 
cils; though they may have been incorporated into 
the creeds of the Church, are the correct interpreta- 
tion. It is still an open question which no one has a 
right to assume to be settled, what is the teaching of 
the Bible on points that are supposed to come in col- 
lision with the revelations of science. As there is no 
tribunal to ascertain what are the teachings of science, 
but as it is an open question for every man to settle 
for himself if he chooses, so there is no authoritative 
tribunal in the Church to determine what is the mean- 
ing of the Bible, but it is an open question for every 
man to determine as he does in regard to the meaning 
of any other book. 

(4) In reference to by far the largest part of the 
sciences, it is not, and cannot be pretended that there 
is any contradiction between them and the Bible ; in 
reference to most of those in which it was supposed or 
alleged that there was a contradiction, the point has 
been yielded by even the rejectors of the Bible that 
there is no such conflict. We have seen, in the remarks 
made above, that the objections drawn from astronomy, 
from the origin of languages, from the astronomical 
tables of the Hindoos, from the alleged historical records 
of India and China, and from the zodiacs of Egypt, 
have been abandoned. It is also true that in reference 
to the larger portion of the sciences, properly so called, 
it cannot be, and has never been alleged that they are 
contradictory to the Bible, for the Bible makes no 
statements in regard to them which, can be supposed to 
come in conflict with them. This is true of the sciences 
9 



118 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

of anatomy, physiology, botany, natural history, che- 
mistry, mental philosophy, magnetism, electricity, 
geometry, algebra, fluxions, metallurgy, and kindred 
subjects. It is also certain that in the schools and col- 
leges of Christian countries it is rare, in the regular 
course of studies, that there occurs a point on which 
there seems to be a collision between the statements 
involved in the regular instruction, and the statements 
in the Bible, or in which it becomes necessary for a 
teacher who is a friend of revelation, to interpose even 
a single remark to guard against a perceived tendency 
in the science to scepticism. While this is true, it is 
also true that no ancient book of science on any one of 
these subjects, except geometry, could be used without 
coming into direct conflict with the statements of modern 
science. What would be said of the Timaeus of Plato, 
in our colleges, in this respect ? It is also true that, 
while no other books received by any portion of the 
world as a divine revelation, unless it be the Koran, 
could be so used without coming in direct conflict with 
the disclosures of science, the Bible can be used, and 
is used, in those schools of learning ; its statements are 
familiarly referred to ; its study is enjoined or made a 
matter of earnest exhortation, and with no apprehension 
that its statements will be found to come in collision 
with the regular course of instruction on these subjects, 
and with a conviction on the part of the friends of the 
Bible that the profoundest investigation of those sciences 
has no tendency whatever to send out into the world 
a generation of educated sceptics. Indeed, it is one of 
the sternest principles of Protestantism that the Bible 
should he in the schools of learning; it' is a point on 
which the friends of the Bible are most readily aroused 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 119 

when an attempt is made to exclude it from schools 
and colleges ; it is a point in which they feel entire 
confidence that the more directly and constantly they 
can keep that book in contact with the minds of edu- 
cated and scientific men, the more certain will be its 
reception as a revelation from God. 

(5) In respect to science, there remain some points 
which, it must be admitted, remain unsettled, and where 
it is a fair and open question still, whether the future 
disclosures in these sciences will accord with the reve- 
lations of the Bible. While it must be conceded by all, 
from the history of the past, that there is no presump- 
tion that these will not be found to accord with, the 
statements in the Bible, it must also be conceded by 
the friends of revelation that it is perfectly fair for the 
friend of science to push his inquiries as far as he can, 
and with no desire to shape his facts with reference to 
any desired or any desirable result in their bearing on 
revelation. The friend of the Bible should not fear 
the result; the friend of science should pursue bis 
researches as if there were no such book, and with no 
desire either to find it true or false. The hammer of 
the geologist, the blowpipe of the chemist, the glass of 
the astronomer, are not to be controlled or modified 
by any moral considerations. 

The main points referred to here as being as yet 
unsettled, relate to geology, and to the unity of 

THE RACE. 

A. Geology. — This is a recent science. It is but a 
brief period since even science started the idea that the 
world is more than about six thousand years old ; or, 
if that idea had occurred, that it has been attempted to 
determine it by any known facts. Fable, fancy, pre- 



120 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

tended records, had indeed referred to a long existence 
of nations on the earth prior to the Mosaic account of 
the creation of man, but no facts of science had been 
discovered to confirm those records, or to impart truth 
to those fables. 

It is not proposed to enter here into any protracted 
inquiry on this subject. The only point necessary to 
be noticed is, that up to this time no contradiction between 
the disclosures of geology and the statements of the Bible 
has been demonstrated, and that there is nothing as yet in 
the science which makes it certain that there will be found 
to be such a contradiction. 

In illustration of this, the following remarks may be 
made: — 

(1) The science of geology must be admitted to be 
as yet so incomplete that it cannot be assumed to be 
certain in respect to those points which seem to be in 
collision with the Bible that future disclosures may 
not materially modify the conclusions which are to be 
drawn from the science. There are, indeed, facts in 
regard to the science as clearly determined as any 
facts in any of the other established sciences. There 
are facts entirely at variance with the views held for- 
merly in regard to the past duration of the world, 
and with, the notions heretofore entertained by the 
Christian world in regard to the statements of the 
Bible on that subject. It has been demonstrated that 
the world has stood many thousands, perhaps many 
millions of years, and the friend of revelation cannot 
deny this. It has been demonstrated that there were 
numerous orders of now extinct animals upon the 
earth long before the Scripture account of the crea- 
tion of man — animals that have, for the most part, 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 121 

long since passed away; animals adapted to a different 
state of things from that which now exists on the 
earth; animals which could not exist now. It has 
been demonstrated that death reigned among those 
animals long before man was created, and conse- 
quently that the views which have been entertained 
by theologians about the death of animals as connected 
with the transgression of man, and as the fruit of that 
transgression, must be abandoned. But it is yet to be 
proved that these points come into collision with any 
explicit statements of the Bible. And in reference to 
any supposed collision of the facts of geology with the 
actual statements of the Bible, it is further to be 
observed that the science of geology is as yet so in- 
complete that it is not time yet to affirm or to presume 
that the conclusions from that science, when fully 
settled, will be in conflict with the Bible. In a science 
so recent, and where the principles are as yet so im- 
perfectly determined, and the facts so imperfectly 
ascertained, it does not seem too much for the friend 
of revelation, in cases where there may seem to be a 
conflict between the statements of the science and the 
statements of the Bible, to ask that the judgment 
should be suspended until two points are clearly 
settled : (a), until the facts in geology shall be certainly 
ascertained; and (b\ until it shall be determined 
whether the fair interpretation of the Bible, not the 
current traditions of theology, may not be in harmony 
with the disclosures of the science. 

(2) It is a very material fact as bearing on this sub- 
ject, that, amidst all the fossil remains of the geologist, 
and all the records of past times, there is no proof that 
man has lived longer than the period assigned to him in 



122 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

the Mosaic history. In all that the geologist relies on 
to demonstrate the existence of the inferior orders of 
animals on the earth prior to the Mosaic account of the 
creation of man, he has not presented us with one 
human bone, or with one indication of the existence of 
man. Other fossil remains, other bones, he has dis- 
interred in abundance ; but not one that has yet been 
proved to have belonged to the human species. So in 
respect to all coins, medals, historical records, monu- 
ments. There are no historical records of the existence 
of man on the earth that go back to such ancient times. 
There are no remains of unknown cities, no tombs, no 
mausoleums, that would prove that man then existed, 
now found amidst the fossil remains of extinct orders of 
animals. We wander among decaying ruins ; we are 
among broken arches, pillars, tombs; we look upon the 
magnificent Coliseum, the mighty pyramid, the falling 
tower, the ivy-bound column, the ruined temple, the 
ancient castle ; we brush the dust from ancient inscrip- 
tions, and decipher their solemn records, and make the 
past generations speak out amidst these monuments ; 
but there is not a solitary voice that disputes the record 
of the Jewish historian about the recent origin of man, 
or that points to a time when he lived anterior to the 
bliss of Eden. 

In this connection it may be proper to quote a 
memorable passage written by Bishop Berkley a cen- 
tury ago, and quoted with approbation by Sir Charles 
Lyell, in which he inferred, on grounds which may be 
termed strictly geological, the recent date of the crea- 
tion of man. " To any one," says he, " who considers 
that, on digging into the earth, such quantities of 
shells, and, in some places, bones and horns of animals, 



IN THE WOED OF GOD. 123 

are found sound and entire, after having laid there, in 
all probability, some thousands of years; it should 
seem probable that guns, medals, and implements in 
metal or stone, might have lasted entire, buried under 
ground forty or fifty thousand years, if the world had 
been so old. How comes it then to pass that no 
remains are found, no antiquities of these numerous 
ages preceding the Scripture accounts of time; that 
no fragments of buildings, no public monuments, no 
intaglios, cameos, statues, basso-relievos, medals, in- 
scriptions, utensils, or artificial work of any kind, are 
ever discovered which may bear testimony to the 
existence of those mighty empires, those successions 
of monarchs, heroes, and demi-gods, for so many 
thousand years ? Let us look forward and suppose ten 
or twenty thousand years to come, during which time 
we will suppose that plagues, famines, wars, and earth- 
quakes shall have made great havoc in the world, is it 
not highly probable that, at the end of such, a period, 
pillars, walls, and statues now in being, of granite, 
or porphyry, or jasper (stones of such hardness as we 
know them to have lasted two thousand years above 
ground without any considerable alteration), would 
bear record of these and past ages ? Or that some of 
our current coins might then be dug up, or old walls 
and the foundations of buildings show themselves, as 
well as the shells and stones of the primaeval world, 
which are preserved down to our time ?"* 

On this passage, Sir Charles Lyell remarks, "that 
many signs of the agency of man would have lasted at 
least as long as the ' shells of the primaeval world,' had 

* Alciphron, ortlie Minute Philosopher, vol. ii. pp. 84, 85, ed. 1732. 



124 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

our race been so ancient, we may feel as fully per- 
suaded as Berkley ; and we may anticipate with con- 
fidence that many edifices and implements of human 
workmanship, and the skeletons of men and casts of 
the human form, will continue to exist when a great 
part of the present mountains, continents, and seas, 
have disappeared. Assuming the future duration of 
the planet to be indefinitely protracted, we can foresee 
no limit to the perpetuation of some of the memorials 
of man, which are continually imbedded in the bowels 
of the earth, or in the bed of the ocean, unless we 
carry forward our views to a period sufficient to allow 
the various causes of change, both igneous and aque- 
ous, to remodel more than once the outer crust of the 
earth. One complete revolution will be inadequate to 
efface every monument of our existence; for many 
works of art might enter again and again into the for- 
mation of successive eras and escape obliteration, even 
though the very rocks in which they had been for ages 
imbedded were destroyed; just as pebbles included in 
the conglomerates of our epoch often contain the 
organized remains of beings which flourished during a 
prior era."* 

If these things are so, how can it be believed that 
man has lived upon the earth during the ancient 
geologic periods of the world? What evidence is 
there that he existed prior to the Mosaic period of the 
creation ? If he did exist then, how is it to be ac- 
counted for that all the monuments of his being have 
perished, while the memorials of other, and inferior 
races, remain? 

* Principles of Geology, vol. ii. p. 157, ed. 1837. 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 125 

(3) It is capable of clear demonstration that man 
could not have lived in the vast geologic periods 
of the early history of the earth ; and could not, there- 
fore, have been created but in the order of events 
which are described in the Mosaic narrative. The 
disclosures of geology all go to show that man was 
the ultimate object contemplated in creation ; that all 
the 'types' of being previous to his appearance in the 
world had reference to him ; that the condition of the 
world in those long geologic periods was such that he 
could not have lived then; and that when, by this 
long previous process, the earth was prepared for his 
residence, he then appeared^ not as a development, but 
as a new creature. The process of this is so clear that 
it cannot now be doubted. Man did not appear in the 
early geological periods. He could not have found 
sustenance adapted to his nature. If he had been 
created then, he would have soon died. It is only at 
the latest stage of the development of the earth's his- 
tory, as made known by geology, that the earth was 
fitted for the residence of man, or that he could have 
lived upon it. In the British Museum, almost as if by 
accident, and yet as the result of the researches of 
geological science, among the records of other ages in 
fossil remains, man is assigned exactly the place — the 
last in the series of creations — to which he is arranged 
in the Mosaic record of creation.* 

All the researches of geologists have gone to confirm 
this fact, and to place man in the order of created 
things, in the exact place where Moses placed him, as 
the last in the series. They have gone also to show 

* See the Testimony of the Rocks, by Hugh Miller, pp. 163-171. 



126 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

that all the previous creations had reference to such a 
being as man, and that the progressive development 
in the series of created things contemplated some such 
being as man as the ultimate point to be reached, or 
had their proper termination in him. Of that fact the 
testimony of men whose opinions will not be called 
in question furnishes the fullest proof. Two such 
authorities, sufficient in the case, may be referred to. 
The one is that of Professor Owen, "supreme in his 
own special walk as a comparative anatomist." " The 
recognition of an ideal exemplar for the vertebrated 
animals proves," he says, " that the knowledge of such 
a being as man must have existed before man appeared. 
For the Divine Mind that planned the archetype also 
foreknew all its modifications. The archetypal idea 
was manifested in the flesh under divers modifications 
upon this planet, long prior to the existences of those 
animal species that actually exemplify it."* Not less 
remarkable is the testimony of Agassiz, as the result 
of an examination of the geologic existences, more 
extended and minute, in at least the department per- 
taining to fishes, than that of any other man. "It is 
evident," he says, in the conclusion of his recent work 
on the Principles of Zoology fi " that there is a manifest 
progress in the succession of beings on the surface of 
the earth. This progress consists in an increasing 
similarity to the living fauna, and among the verte- 

* Quoted by Hugh Miller, "Testimony of the Rocks," p. 228. 

f Principles of Zoology, touching the Structure, Development, 
Distribution, and Natural Arrangement of the Races of Animals, 
Living and Extinct. For the use of Schools and Colleges. Part I. 
Comparative Physiology. By Louis Agassiz, and Augustus A. 
Gould. Boston, Gould and Lincoln. 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 127 

brates, especially in their increasing resemblance to 
man. But this connection is not the consequence of a 
direct lineage between the faunas of different ages. 
There is nothing like parental descent connecting 
them. The fishes of the Pakeozoic age are in no re- 
spect the ancestors of the reptiles of the Secondary 
age, nor does man descend from the mammals which 
preceded him in the Tertiary age. The link by which 
they are connected is of a higher and immaterial 
nature, and this connection is to be sought in the view 
of the Creator himself, whose aim in forming the earth, 
in allowing it to undergo the successive changes which 
geology has pointed out, and in creating successively 
all the different types of animals which have passed 
away, Was to introduce man upon the globe. Man is the 
END TOWARDS WHICH ALL THE ANIMAL CREATION HAS 
TENDED FROM THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE FIRST 

Paleozoic fishes." No one can fail to remark how 
entirely this accords with the account of the creation 
of man in the first chapter of the book of Genesis, 
and with the statement of the place and importance of 
man everywhere found in the Bible. 

(4) It is certain that this fact, thus stated as the result 
of the investigations of geology — the fact that man is 
the last in the series of created beings; that he had no 
place upon the earth in the earlier periods of its history; 
that he was not found among the animals first made ; 
that he could not have existed in those periods ; and 
that all the previous creations had a reference to him, 
and terminated on him as the highest type of being on 
earth, could have been known to Moses, if they are 
fairly implied in his statement, only as the result of re- 
velation. It cannot be pretended that he was acquainted 



128 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

with the revelations of that science which has been, as 
yet, last in the order of human investigation — geology; 
and it cannot be believed that his statement was the 
result of a happy conjecture. Such a conjecture is found 
nowhere else in the writings of men ; it is one which 
sceptics now are unwilling to believe to be true, and the 
correctness of which they are constantly endeavoring 
to set aside. It is a statement, therefore, which, when 
found in a book professing to be a revelation, could 
have been only the result of a knowledge superior to 
any that man possessed from any other source. It is, 
however, such a statement as, on the supposition that the 
Bible is of divine origin, and that God, the Author of 
the Book, knew, as he must certainly have known, that 
these discoveries in geology would be made in a far 
distant age of the world, might have been reasonably 
expected to be found there, for it must have been fore- 
seen that a comparison would be made between the 
revelations of geology and the statements of the Bible 
in regard to the origin of man, which would have an 
important bearing on the question whether the Bible is 
from God. 

(5) There is one other consideration which should 
be allowed to exert an important influence in deter- 
mining the question whether the disclosures of geology 
are consistent with the statements of the Bible. This 
consideration may be thus stated and illustrated : In 
the courts of justice, the testimony of medical men is 
often called in, not to determine in regard to the 
question whether life has been taken where one has 
been accused of murder, but to determine the question 
whether what may have been administered to the 
murdered man was poison, and was sufficient in quan- 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 129 

tity to take his life ; or whether the blow which may 
have been struck, was of sufficient force, or so affected 
a vital part, as to destroy life. In such a case, the 
medical man may know nothing of the facts as to the 
question who administered the poison, or who inflicted 
the blow, and consequently may have no evidence to 
give as to the question whether the man accused is 
the one really guilty of the crime, but he gives his 
testimony on a point in which he is qualified to judge, 
and where the court and jury may not be qualified to 
judge. That is, the court calls in the aid of his medi- 
cal knowledge and experience in a case where the wit- 
ness would be impartial, and where his knowledge 
may be of the utmost value in forming an opinion. 
Those who usually occupy the position of judges 
would not be supposed to be qualified to determine 
these points for themselves ; those who are commonly 
called to act on a jury are wholly incompetent. To 
this mode of appeal there can certainly be no objec- 
tion ; and no one supposes that injustice is likely to be 
done, even if the decision of the case should turn 
finally in fact on this testimony. 

Something like this must occur in regard to the 
questions respecting the relation of geology to the 
Bible. While no man would say that the geologist, as 
such, is to determine the question whether the Bible is 
a revelation from God ; while no one would maintain 
that it is to be received by mankind because one geo- 
logist sees no discrepancy between the two, or rejected 
because another geologist thinks he does; while the 
great principle is to be held firm that every man is to 
judge for himself whether he can receive the Bible as 
a revelation, it is still true that the great mass of men 



130 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

are wholly unable to determine the questions respect- 
ing geology, as they are those which pertain to other 
sciences. They are not acquainted with the facts of 
the science. They have not the ability or the oppor- 
tunity to investigate those facts, and they never can, 
for themselves, institute an intelligent comparison 
between those doctrines and the statements of the 
Scriptures. They are as ignorant of those facts as 
they are of the higher revelations of astronomy; as 
ignorant as the jury in the cases supposed is on the 
question whether what was administered was poison of 
such a nature, and in such a quantity, as to take life, 
or whether the wound inflicted was the real cause 
of the man's death. In the questions suggested by 
geology, therefore, in regard to revelation, it does not 
seem improper to ask what is the impression made on 
the minds of geologists themselves, and whether the 
most profound and extended acquaintance with the 
science has in fact had a tendency to make those who 
are most learned in this science, and best qualified 
to judge, infidels. The fair question is not whether 
there may be found geologists who are unbelievers, 
for there are undoubtedly such men, as there are 
astronomers, anatomists and historians, who are sceptics 
in religion. And the question, furthermore, is not 
whether such geologists have been made infidels, or 
have been confirmed in their infidelity by the study 
of geology, for this may have been the case, as it is 
undoubtedly true that an infidel astronomer, anatomist, 
or historian might endeavor to confirm himself in scep- 
ticism by facts drawn from his favorite science, and 
that he may have pursued the science itself in such a 
manner as to have led him into scepticism. But the 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 131 

proper question in all such cases is, whether the study 
of these sciences has in fact had a tendency to make men 
infidels ; whether those most eminent in these depart- 
ments of knowledge have been led to reject the authority 
of revelation from the disclosures of their own sciences ; 
and whether the fact that a part of their number are 
sceptics cannot be fairly traced to some other cause 
than to the necessary conclusions drawn from their own 
favorite sciences. It seems to be plain that the fact 
that such men as Galileo, Kepler, and Newton did not 
see any discrepancy between the teachings of astronomy 
and the Bible ; that so large a portion of astronomers 
are believers in the Bible ; and that the highest dis- 
closures of astronomy are made a part of the regular 
instruction in all Christian colleges, without any appre- 
hension of the result as bearing on revealed religion, 
should be regarded as furnishing some evidence on 
which minds not competent to make the investigation 
themselves might rely, that there is no discrepancy be- 
tween the Bible and the revelations of astronomy. 

Now, there are undoubtedly geologists who are in- 
fidels, as there are anatomists, astronomers, chemists, 
historians, who are. But while this is true, it is also 
true that the great body of geologists are not infidels ; 
that the men whose names have been most distinguished 
in prosecuting that science are not rejecters of the 
Bible; and that the Christian world, by admitting the 
study of geology into its colleges and schools, is not 
treating the subject as if it were felt that there is any- 
thing to be dreaded from the cultivation of that science. 
It is sufficient here, in order to show the nature of this 
argument, to refer to the names John Pye Smith, Prof. 
Buckland, Prof. Silliman, Prof. Kichard Owen, Pres. 



132 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

Hitchcock, and Hugh Miller. That such men do not 
see any such discrepancy between the statements of 
the Bible and the disclosures of geology as to shake 
their faith in revelation, may be allowed to furnish 
evidence to minds not competent to make the investi- 
gation themselves, that there is little danger that any 
conclusions yet to be reached from the science will be 
likely to militate against the statements of the word of 
God. 

It is a consideration also which should be allowed 
to have no little weight on a question of this nature, 
and in the point of view now under consideration, that 
without an exception at present, all the colleges, and a 
very large part of the academies and schools for both 
sexes in this land, have been either founded directly 
for the promotion of Christianity in connection with 
sound learning, or are under Christian influence ; that 
a large portion of the presidents, professors, and teach- 
ers in those schools are ministers of the Gospel or 
private members of the church ; and that geology is 
taught as a part of the system of regular instruction 
as freely as any other branch of learning. JSTo appre- 
hension is felt that the fair conclusions from that 
science will be found to be in conflict with the revela- 
tions of the Bible. No such contradiction has been 
established between the two as to excite alarm among 
the friends of religion. The 'presumption from such 
facts as these is that there is no such contradiction 
between the two. 

B. The Unity of the Kace. — The questions which 
have arisen out of this subject are, like those of geo- 
logy, of recent origin. Until within quite a recent 
period, it has not been seriously maintained to any 



m THE WORD OF GOD. 133 

considerable extent that the different classes of men 
upon the earth have had a different origin; or that 
there was any discrepancy between the facts on that 
subject, as ascertained by science, and the teachings of 
the Bible. It has been supposed that all the diversi- 
ties in complexion, in the hair, in the facial angle, in 
the anatomical structure, could be accounted for on 
some other theory than that the races have had each 
a separate ancestry, or consistently with the doctrine 
that all the families of men have been derived from 
one pair. 

This point has assumed an importance in this age 
which it has never had before, and it cannot but have 
an important bearing on the question respecting the 
truth of the Bible, as well as on the subject of freedom 
and slavery — for there seem to be but two considera- 
tions which could make any class of men desire to find 
that there has been a diversity of origin in regard to 
the races of mankind : One, that the Bible may be 
found to be false in its statements; the other, that 
there may be some plausible pretext to justify one part 
of mankind in enslaving another. If, in the one case, 
it could be demonstrated that the races of men have 
had a diversity of origin, that fact would destroy the 
authority of the Bible, for, as we shall see, the state- 
ments in the Bible on that subject are explicit; if, in 
the other case, the fact of such a diversity of origin 
could be established, it would be one of the readiest 
ways of justifying the enslaving of the inferior order 
of human beings by the superior, or, at least, it would 
destroy one of the most troublesome arguments which 
has been urged against the system of slaveholding, 
that which is derived from the fact that "God has made 
10 



134: THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

of one blood all the nations of men," or that the slave 
and his master are brethren. 

In reference to the question about the unity of the 
race, there are two things to be stated which must be 
admitted to be true alike by the friends and the enemies 
of the Bible. 

One is, that the question in regard to the origin of 
the races, is, as a scientific question, as yet unsettled. It is 
not so determined as to command the universal, or 
even the general assent of scientific men, that the races 
of men have had a different origin, or that all the 
diversities of complexion and of anatomical structure 
cannot be accounted for on the supposition that all 
are descended from one pair. The great mass of sci- 
entific men are not, in fact, convinced of this, nor has 
the doctrine that the race has had a diversity of 
origin yet passed into the admitted facts of science. It 
cannot be assumed, therefore, that the facts in the case 
are contrary to the statements in the Bible. 

The other point that must be admitted is, that it is 
a perfectly fair and open scientific question whether 
there is evidence that the races have had a diversity of 
origin, or whether all existing facts can be explained 
on the supposition that the race has descended from 
one pair. As in the case of geology, astronomy, 
anatomy, and all the other sciences, the inquiry on 
this subject may be pursued, and must be pursued, in 
a manner quite independent of the testimony of the 
Bible, and with no fear, on the one hand, of impinging 
on its doctrines, and with no desire, on the other, as a 
purely scientific pursuit, to find the testimony of the 
Bible true. The scientific man should not desire to 
reach any favorite conclusions unfavorable to a belief 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 135 

in the divine origin of the Bible, nor should the friend 
of the Bible dread to have the inquiry pursued on the 
most independent scientific principles. 

With these views, it may not be improper to slate 
exactly how the matter on this point now stands, and 
what is the probability thus far, that any results will 
be reached which will be in conflict with the statements 
in the Bible about the origin of man. 

What seems necessary to be stated on this subject, 
so far as it relates to the question about the unity of 
the race in its bearing on the truth of the Bible, may 
be conveniently arranged under four heads : — 

I. It is an unquestionable doctrine of the Bible that 
the whole race of mankind is descended from one 
original pair — Adam and Eve ; or that there has not 
been a separate ancestry for each of the subordinate 
races of men — the Mongolian, the Caucasian, the Ethio- 
pian, and the American. I believe that the Bible as- 
serts that. I believe that he who receives the Bible is 
bound to hold that doctrine. I believe that the rejecter 
of the Bible has a right to hold him who professes to 
believe the Bible to that doctrine. I believe that the 
statements of the Scriptures on that point are so clear, 
and that the doctrine of the unity of the race as de- 
scended from one pair is so implied in all the state- 
ments of the Bible about man — so identified with all 
the doctrines of the Bible in regard to the Fall and 
the Eedemption of man — that if it could be demonstrated 
that the human family is NOT descended from one pair, 
and is NOT, in the proper sense of the term, one race, it 
would he impossible to receive the Bible as a revelation 
from God. I can conceive of no fair method of inter- 



136 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

pretation which would make the teachings of the Bible 
consistent with such a fact. 

In support of this opinion that the Bible teaches 
that the race is one, as descended from one pair, I refer 
to the following considerations : — 

(1) The account in the Book of Genesis supposes this. 
In that statement (ch. i.) there is a general account of the 
preparation of the earth to be the abode of the different 
races of animated beings. There is a statement of the 
creation of fowls, and fishes, and mammalia, without 
specifying any distinct location, or any distinct specific 
parentage, with general statements only. "Let the earth 
bring forth grass." "Let the waters bring forth abund- 
antly the moving creature that hath life, and the fowl 
that may fly above the earth." " Let the earth bring forth 
the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping 
thing, and beast of the earth after his kind." In these 
statements ample room is left for the supposition that 
they may have been brought into existence in the seas, 
the rivers, the forests, the deserts, the air, or the waters 
where they may now be found. But in the account of 
the creation of man, there is a specific statement of the 
formation of one pair of human beings; located in a 
particular spot ; placed under a particular form of ad- 
ministration ; and sustaining a particular relation to 
the inhabitants of the newly made world. This is the 
whole account of the creation of man in the Bible. It 
teaches that one pair was formed by the act of the 
Creator, and as the last act of creation. The account 
implies that no other human beings were made ; the 
account is inconsistent with the supposition that there 
were anv other such creations. 



IN THE WOKD OF GOD. 137 

(2) The Bible teaches that the flood swept off the 
race — all human beings save one family. On this point, 
the teaching of the Scriptures is perfectly unambigu- 
ous. Whether the flood swept over the whole earth or 
not, it swept off all the races of men. No one can 
doubt that Moses meant to declare that all human 
beings, except the one family of Noah, were cut off by 
the deluge. This is perfectly clear, not only from the 
general account in the narrative, but by the declara- 
tion that is made after that family had left the ark : 
" These are the three sons of Noah, and of them was 
the whole earth overspread." — Gen. ix. 19. No man can 
possibly receive the account in Genesis as true, and yet 
suppose that there were, in any part of the earth, dur- 
ing the flood, surviving races or families of human 
beings — races of another origin, that were not cut off 
in the deluge. If, therefore, there had been originally 
different founders of the races, or different races of men 
at the creation, they were, according to the Scripture 
account, swept off at the deluge ; if the present inhabit- 
ants of the earth are of different races, there has been, 
somewhere upon the earth, a process of creation since 
the days of Noah, if the account of the flood be true. 

(3) The account in the Bible is that the earth was 
peopled from the family that survived the flood. There 
is. no record of any new creation of men; there is no 
room left to suppose that such an act of creation 
occurred. One of the most remarkable portions of 
history to be found anywhere, is the tenth chapter of 
the Book of Genesis. It seems, to a casual reader, to 
be among the most dry and unimportant documents 
that have come down to us from ancient times, being 
almost wholly made up of names, and apparently bar- 



138 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

ren of incident and interest ; and yet, barren as it is, 
it contains more information about the origin of nations 
and the peopling of the world, and does more to ex- 
plain the state of affairs where history properly begins, 
than all the Chinese, the Chaldean, the Greek, and the 
Eoman historians put together. That one chapter 
makes clear in history what would otherwise be unin- 
telligible, and explains what would otherwise be in- 
volved in impenetrable mystery. That chapter sup- 
poses that the world was peopled by the descendants 
of one family ; and it is a remarkable fact that the ori- 
gin of all the nations whose source can be ascertained 
at all, can be traced up to some of the branches of that 
one family. If history has had any other records of 
the origin of any of the present dwellers upon the 
earth, that history is not now accessible, and it may be 
presumed to be irrecoverably lost. There is no other 
account of the origin of man than that which is found 
in Genesis ; and that account supposes that there is but 
one race of men upon the earth. 

(4) The account of the origin of sin and death in the 
Bible supposes the same thing. The reason why all 
men sin is distinctly traced to the sin of one man ; 
and death is everywhere declared to be the effect of 
sin. Whatever force men may attribute to the state- 
ment, whether they are disposed to receive it as credible 
or not, the statement in the Bible is unambiguous, that 
sin and death in man are to be traced to the fact that 
Adam, as the head of the race, violated the law of God, 
and incurred its penalty. The Scripture doctrine is, 
that "in Adam all die" (1 Cor. xv. 22); that "by one 
man sin entered into the world, and death by sin" (Rom. 
v. 12) ; that " by one man's disobedience many were 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 139 

made sinners" (Rom. v. 19); and that "by man came 
death" (1 Cor. xv. 21). It will be seen, at once, that 
though men universally sin and die, this would not be 
a correct or satisfactory explanation of those facts, if 
there are different races of men that have been created 
at different times. If any portion of human beings 
belong to another race than that of Adam, it is no 
explanation of the fact that they sin and die to say that 
he violated the law of God. Whatever force that rea- 
son may have, it bears only on those who belong pro- 
perly to his own posterity. It should be added here, 
also, that whatever may be thought of this explanation 
of the fact that sin and death have come upon the race, 
no other explanation has been furnished. 

(5) The work of redemption is founded on the sup- 
position that there is one race. Christ assumed human 
nature, and died for men. He is expressly spoken of 
as the "second man" (1 Cor. xv. 47); "the last Adam" 
(1 Cor. xv. 45), in contradistinction from "the first 
man," and "the first Adam." He comes to repair the 
ruins of the fall; to meet the consequences of the sin 
of the parent of mankind ; to lay a foundation for the 
offer of pardon and salvation to all who were ruined 
by the apostasy in Eden. Thus it is said, "As in Adam 
all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 
Cor. xv. 22); " by man came death, by man came also 
the resurrection of the dead" (1 Cor. xv. 21); "as is 
the earthy, such are they that are earthy, and as is the 
heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly" (1 Cor. 
xv. 48); "as we have borne the image of the earthy, 
we shall also bear the image of the heavenly" (1 Cor. xv. 
49) ; " as by one man's disobedience many were made 
sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made 



140 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

righteous" (Eom. v. 19), and "where sin abounded, 
grace did much more abound" (Rorn. v. 20). Thus, 
also, the command is given to go and preach the gospel 
to every creature, on the ground that Christ died for all, 
or tasted death for every man. Nor can it be denied 
that all this — the creation, the fall, the atonement; 
sin, woe, death, redemption — proceeds on the supposi- 
tion that the race is one; that Christ took upon him 
human nature as such, and died for man as such, with 
reference to no particular race, or family of man. The 
offer of the gospel to any one supposes that he is a de- 
scendant of the apostate Adam, and therefore involved 
in sin and misery ; to no one would it be proper to 
offer that gospel except on that supposition ; from no 
one have we a right to withhold it if that supposition 
is true. 

(6) It is expressly affirmed in the Bible that there is 
one race : "And hath made of one blood all nations of 
men for to dwell on all the face of the earth." — Acts 
xvii. 26. The fair and natural meaning of this is that 
the nations of the earth belong to one race, or are de- 
scended from one parentage. If this is not true, Paul 
could not with any propriety have made the assertion 
as he did. His design in thus addressing the people of 
Athens cannot be mistaken. It was to prepare the way 
for what he intended to say about the gospel, that it 
was needed by all, and was adapted to all. If there 
are different races of men, Athens would have been the 
very place to announce that fact. It had twenty thou- 
sand freemen, and four hundred thousand slaves. It 
would have been an eminently popular doctrine to have 
announced to Stoics and Epicureans that they were of 
nobler blood, and had a different origin, from the slaves 



IN THE WOED OF GOD. 141 

beneath them. But Paul hinted at nothing of this; he 
evidently believed nothing of this ; he taught a doctrine 
which cannot be reconciled with this. 

The sum of what has been said in this argument is 
that the Bible proceeds on the supposition that there 
was one pair which was the head of all human beings; 
that there is an impassable distinction between the hu- 
man race and all other dwellers upon the earth ; that 
all human beings in all lands and ages are affected by 
the conduct of the first man as if all were descended 
from him ; that one Saviour, descended in his human 
nature from him, is provided for all; that the same 
gospel, and on the same grounds, is offered to all; that 
the same " blood" flows in all human veins. 

II. The same fact in regard to the unity of the race 
is confirmed by the testimony of history, so far as his- 
torical records bear on the subject. 

The authentic records of history trace up the affairs 
of no one of the great divisions of the race to any other 
ancestors than the Adam and Eve of the Scriptures. 
They may not, indeed they do not, all trace up the 
affairs of the race to this ancestry ; but they disclose 
no other. If they do not go up to this, they are lost 
in fables, myths, and shadows. This argument lies 
essentially in these three points : — 

First, in the fact that all authentic records of the 
human race lie within the period assigned by Moses as 
that when man was created. Indeed, no well authenti- 
cated history goes back over three-quarters of that 
period, and when we have gathered all that can be 
gathered of history from profane records and monu- 
ments, there is a long period after the creation of man 
in which the Bible is the sole guide. No one can 



142 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

penetrate that dark region farther than the Jewish his- 
torian leads him ; no one, therefore, can appeal to any 
records which will disprove the truth of that in the 
Bible. 

Second. We have in the Bible a designed historical 
account of the creation of man — of man as man. This 
account occurs at the close of the account of the crea- 
tion of other beings, the last work of creation on the 
earth. It is designed to be a record of the creation of 
man as distinct from the account of the creation of the 
inhabitants of the sea, the dry land, and the atmosphere. 
It is a remarkably clear and distinct account; and ac- 
cords, in all the circumstances, so far as we can judge, 
with what must be true. It gives an account of the 
formation of the body out of what is called ' the dust of 
the ground,' that is, the same material, or as we should 
say, the same chemical substances of which other things 
are composed, in entire accordance with what we now 
know to be the fact; and of the imparting of the breath 
of life, the immortal nature, from a higher source, the 
divine Spirit itself, in accordance with what we find all 
men to be endowed with. It gives an account of the 
formation of a single pair, sustaining a relation to each 
other in their origin which accords with the laws of our 
nature respecting the marriage relation, and which 
gives the highest sanction and importance to that rela- 
tion. In the account of the origin of this one pair, it has 
stated a fact which will explain the peopling of the 
world, for no one will doubt that the world, so far as 
numbers are concerned, may have been peopled as it 
has been from that one original pair. This history is 
clear, distinct, unambiguous, and it goes up to the 
beginning of things. 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 143 

Third. This is the only account which we have of 
the creation of a human being. As already intimated, 
no other history pretends to give any account that would 
be satisfactory to a philosophical mind that can contra- 
vene this. In all authentic history — history that is in 
the least degree entitled to credence — as that of Egypt, 
Babylonia, Greece, Eome, India, and China, we find, at 
the earliest periods to which they go back, human beings 
already in existence playing their part in human affairs 
— building cities, cultivating fields, founding empires, 
waging war; we find no account of the creation of a 
new race there to perform an allotted work in that par- 
ticular land. Travellers furnish no account of the 
creation of men now in any new portion of the world ; 
and in all the records of ancient and modern times that 
have any claim to credibility, there is no account of 
the creation of more than one pair ; there is no other 
head of the races of men than the Adam and Eve of 
Moses; there is no starting up of a new order of beings 
upon the earth. 

III. The moral argument for the unity of the human 
race goes to confirm these views. This argument is 
based on what we find in man, as man, showing that 
there is one family, and that man is wholly distinct 
from all other orders and species of beings upon the 
earth ; that is, showing that there is such a uniformity 
and unity as to mark a common origin. I refer here 
to the following points : — 

First ^ to the fact that all men have reason — as all 
would have if descended from the one original pair — 
as no dwellers on the earth do have who do not belong 
to this family. It is true that God might create any 
number of rational beings quite isolated from each 



144 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

other and independent of each other; but the point 
now urged is, that the race of man has this peculiar 
endowment as if all were descended from a first pair. 
All men are so far alike in this that they seem to belong 
to one family ; they are so unlike all other creatures on 
the earth in this respect, that they seem to have had a 
separate and distinct origin from them. This attribute 
of reason is the same in all men — the same in kind, if 
not in degree. It places a vast and impassable barrier 
between man and all other creatures. Not one of them 
ever approximates it as it is in man ; not any class of 
human beings ever, in this respect, sink so low as to 
be incapable of distinction from the orders of the brute 
creation. If one in human form is born bereft of this 
— an idiot — we feel at once assured that he has not 
come up to the dignity of his race ; that though he has 
the form, he has not that which most properly belongs 
to man : and in seeing one thus possessed of the form 
of man, but destitute of that which properly charac- 
terizes man, we have a deeper impression of the differ- 
ence between man and all other creatures on earth than 
we ever do in comparing any of the brute creation with 
man. Humble as the lot of the idiot is, we never con- 
found him with the ourang outang, or with any of the 
monkey tribe. He belongs to a race that was made to 
be endowed with reason, and our compassion towards 
him is excited not by the fact that he is destitute of 
reason — for so is the horse and the ox — but by the fact 
that, being designed for a more exalted purpose, he has, 
in this respect, sunk to the level of the brute. There 
is always a marked distinction between the feelings 
which we have towards him and towards any of the 
brute creation. 



IN THE WOKD OF GOD. 145 

It may be that these cases of idiocy are permitted to 
occur partly in order that rational man may see how 
far God has elevated him in the scale of being, and 
what a difference there is, and must be, between his 
proper rank and that of all the inferior races. 

Second. All human beings have conscience, and no 
others have. It is admitted here, also, that God might 
create any number of isolated and independent beings, 
endowed with this faculty; but the remark now made 
is, that where we find a certain class endowed thus, 
and separated from all others by an impassable chasm, 
it is most philosophical to refer them to a common 
origin, and to suppose that they belong to one race. 
Now no one will doubt that man, as such, is endowed 
with conscience, and that as such he is separated by an 
interval that is never crossed, from all other creatures 
on the earth. It is doubtful whether in any other 
creature on earth there is even the slightest glimmering 
of this faculty, or anything which would ever suggest 
it as even a possible thing. The domestic dog is the 
only animal that ever seems to make any approximation 
to a consciousness of having done wrong ; and if in 
that animal it ever exists, it is in the slightest possible 
degree, and wholly incapable of cultivation in the 
species. In man, however, it is universally found in 
the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the Ethiopian, the Ame- 
rican. It may be much darkened, obscured and per- 
verted, but it is there, and it is capable, by cultivation, 
of becoming all that is needful to control, restrain, and 
govern human conduct. It lives and lingers amidst 
the deepest debasement, and a human being can never 
be so degraded that it shall be wholly expelled from 
the bosom. We are as certain of finding: it. in some 



146 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

form, in the most debased savage as in him who has 
reached the highest type of civilization ; in the most 
oppressed slave, as in the most exalted freeman. We 
are sure that it is there ; we are sure that it can be 
aroused so as to become a most powerful agent in re- 
straining from sin, and prompting to virtue. Now it 
is the most natural and philosophical interpretation of 
this fact, to infer that where this exists, there is one 
race. It is such a fact as would exist if the race were 
one ; it cannot well be supposed that God would engage 
in separate and independent works of creation, when 
this is found so prominent, so powerful, and so dis- 
tinctive a faculty. 

Third. As connected with this, and as consequent on 
this, man is a being, as such, capable of being governed 
by moral law. Here it is to be admitted, also, that God 
might have made any number of beings isolated and 
independent, who would be capable of being governed 
by moral law ; but the point now suggested is, that 
where this is found as constituting a distinct class of 
beings, it is most natural and philosophical to suppose 
that they had a common origin and a common ancestry. 
It cannot be denied that there is a class of undoubted 
facts on which this argument is predicated. Man is 
the only being on earth capable of being governed by 
moral law, or in relation to whose conduct this can be 
relied on. Man is so governed. The laws of God; the 
laws of conscience; the laws of morals; the sense of right 
and wrong, of justice and injustice — these and kindred 
things are the main grounds of reliance all over the 
world in the government of man. In the worst forms 
of despotism; under the most vigilant and rigid police; 
in an army — the most arbitrary and absolute of all 



IN THE WOED OF GOD. 147 

governments ; in all forms of slavery, there is a reliance 
for securing virtue, order, and industry, derived from 
the sense of moral obligation, tenfold more constant 
and more powerful than there is from force or fear. 
Under free institutions it is almost the only reliance, and 
if we take any instance that may occur under the most 
absolute form of despotism, we should be surprised, 
perhaps, to find in how many respects comparatively 
the conduct of the subject is secured by the operations 
of conscience, and by a sense of what is right ; in how 
few, though these may be more marked and prominent, 
by the dread of punishment. Whatever there is of 
fidelity in the domestic relations ; of kindness to others ; 
of honesty and truthfulness; of temperance, chastity, 
and charity — nay, of obedience to laws though unjust, 
and of respect to the despot himself, is to be traced 
much more to this sense of right and wrong than to 
mere arbitrary power. But for this no government 
could be instituted over man ; no subordination could 
be secured. And this pertains to man alone. We 
expect to find it everywhere ; we make it an element 
in all our calculations about a human being. We 
cannot make it an element in our calculations about 
any other creature on earth. Now this looks as if the 
race were one ; as if there was something that divided 
this one race absolutely and forever from all inferior 
beings. It is just such an arrangement as would exist 
on the supposition that all men are descended from 
one ancestry ; it is a fact which cannot be easily ex- 
plained on any other supposition. 

Fourth. The endowments of man in reference to the 
future all show the same thing. I mean that there is 
a class of endowments in this respect to be found in 



148 THE FOUNDATION" OF FAITH 

man, and in man alone, which are what they would be 
on the supposition that the race is descended from a 
single pair, and which are such as they would not be 
on any other supposition. I refer to the fact that 
human beings have hopes, desires, and aspirations, 
which other creatures have not, and that they are of 
such a character as to indicate a common origin. These 
endowments may be, indeed, very feeble in many cases. 
They may be overlaid by ignorance ; by corrupt pas- 
sions ; by brutality. They may be almost trodden out 
by the heel of oppression. But they exist. They can 
be revived. They may become powerful in any human 
being. We have only to cultivate them, to place men 
in such circumstances that they may be developed, to 
make these endowments most elevated and most trans- 
forming elements in controlling men. And these things 
exist in man alone. In no other creature, by any pro- 
cess of cultivation, or by any length of years, can the 
glimmerings of these feelings be excited ; nor can the 
most elevated of the. brutal creation be placed, in these 
respects, on a level with the very lowest of the human 
species. Is not the most natural explanation of this 
fact the supposition that all the race has descended 
from one pair ? 

Fifth. It is also an indisputable fact, indicating unity 
in the race, that the distinction between man and the 
lower animals in the points now referred to, is never 
confounded. The line which divides them is never 
crossed. The brute never becomes a man. The facul- 
ties of the brute are never so enlarged or developed 
that he is exalted to the condition of a human being, 
that he reasons, acts from conscience, cherishes hopes, 
builds houses, writes books, makes speeches, constructs 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 149 

railroads, bridges, or telegraphs. He makes no attain- 
ment which he transmits to coming ages; he does 
nothing which makes the instinct of the next genera- 
tion of his own species different from what it was in 
the first one of the race. The beaver built his house 
with as much skill, and the honey-bee its cell with as 
much mathematical accuracy, in the first age of the 
world, as the beaver and the bee of the present gene- 
ration do. The lion and the elephant of the early 
ages is a lion or an elephant still, and nothing has been 
done to change either of them into a man. 

It is true that this consideration would not of itself 
demonstrate that all the race is descended from one 
pair, any more than a similar consideration would 
demonstrate that all the lions, or all the wolves, or all 
the elephant's were descended respectively from one 
pair ; but it is a consideration to show that there is 
unity in the race ; that it is separated by impassable 
barriers from all the races of animals beneath; and 
that the most natural solution of the facts in the case 
is that they all had one origin. 

Sixth. To this conclusion not a few of the most 
eminent men in science have come as the result of 
purely scientific investigation. It is not to be denied 
that a different opinion is embraced by other men, 
some of them also eminent in science; but the fact 
now adverted to may be regarded as a proof that 
the doctrine of a diversity of origin of the human 
race is not an established fact in the purely scientific 
world, and cannot be alleged as an argument to over- 
throw the authority of the Bible. He cannot be pro- 
perly accused of credulity, or of disregarding the con- 
clusions of science, who maintains with such men as 
11 



150 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

will now be referred to the doctrine of the unity of 
the human race, and the belief of the Scripture ac- 
count that all the varieties of men on the earth have 
descended from one pair. 

"The different races of mankind," says Humboldt 
— employing the language of the distinguished German 
naturalist Miiller, to give expression to the view which 
he himself adopts — "the different races of mankind 
are not different species of a genus, but forms of one 
sole species." "The human species," says Cuvier, 
"appears to be single." "When we compare," says 
Pritchard, "all the facts and observations which have 
been heretofore fully established as to the specific in- 
stincts and separate physical endowments of all the 
distinct tribes of sentient beings in the universe, we 
are entitled to draw confidently the conclusion that all 
human races are of one species and one family ."* 

IV. It has not yet been shown that the diversities 
among men cannot be accounted for on the supposition 
that all the varieties of the human race have been de- 
rived from one pair. It is not easy, indeed, to prove 
a negative, and it is not ordinarily fair in logic to call 
on an adversary to demonstrate a negative, yet, in this 
case it is certainly fair to demand that he who denies 
that all men are descended from one pair, and that 
the Scripture account is the true one, should demon- 
strate that the varieties in the human race cannot be 
accounted for, except on the supposition of a diversity 
of origin. This is the essential point of his position. 
There is certainly no historical fact on which he can 
rely to demonstrate that the varieties of men on the 

* Testimony of the Rocks, pp. 265, 266. 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 151 

earth have had a different parentage ; there are no 
documentary records — no monuments — no, not even 
any traditions — which go back to any distant parent- 
age of the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the African, and 
the American races ; for there are no records which go 
up to the origin of man, unless those records are found 
in the Bible. With all the testimony, therefore, which 
history actually furnishes that men are descended from 
one pair; with all the presumptions in favor of that fact 
derived from the considerations which have been sug- 
gested above; with the undoubted fact that very material 
changes are made in men, and in the habits, the form, 
the qualities of the lower animals, by climate, by train- 
ing, by accident, it is not improper to demand of him 
who denies that the races of men are descended from 
one pair, that he should demonstrate that the diversities 
existing among men cannot have been produced by 
influences such as have been referred to; and parti- 
cularly the three following possible solutions — to spe- 
cify no more — must be set aside, or shown to be im- 
possible, before it will be proper to draw the conclusion 
that the Scripture account is false : — 

(1) It must be shown that the varieties in the human 
family, in complexion, stature, and anatomical structure, 
cannot have been the result of climate, or of long-con- 
tinued habits and customs. Yery great changes, in these 
respects, are produced by these causes ; and it is neces- 
sary that it should be shown that the acknowledged 
differences among men lie beyond the range of such 
changes. It might be necessary, also, to show how far 
such causes may go, and where exactly is the dividing 
line between what may be produced, and what not, from 
those causes. There are great varieties among the Mon- 



152 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

golian people themselves, and yet it would hardly be 
maintained that the Tartars, and the Hindoos, and the 
Chinese races have each a separate ancestry. There 
are great varieties in the American races of savages, 
and yet it would not be maintained that each of the 
tribes which constituted the Iroquois, the Mexicans, 
the Peruvians, and the Patagonians, had a separate an- 
cestry. There are very great varieties in the African 
races between the inhabitants of Congo, the Bakwains, 
and the CafYrarians, but it has not been held to be neces- 
sary to suppose that each of these varieties had a differ- 
ent ancestry. Even the advocates of a diversity of origin 
in the human race, have supposed that all these subor- 
dinate varieties can be accounted for on a different sup- 
position than that they each had a separate ancestry. 
It is not improbable that the hundred and fifty va- 
rieties of dogs on the earth could be traced to a single 
pair; and can it be shown that the varieties in the 
human species could not be accounted for on the sup- 
position that the causes above referred to might have 
produced it? This must be demonstrated — not asserted 
— before it will be logical to set aside the testimony of 
the Bible in the case. 

(2) It must be demonstrated by him who denies the 
doctrine that all the races of men have descended from 
one pair, that the varieties which exist could not have 
been the result of what is commonly called "accident:" 
that is, a variety which, so far as human knowledge 
can go, can be traced to no known cause — a variety 
producing a new type or form, which may be propa- 
gated or transmitted to future generations. There can 
be no doubt that there are laws in regard to such 
methods of producing variety in plants and animals ; 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 153 

but man, as yet, has been unable, to any extent, to 
arrange and classify those laws. Yet it is to this, more 
than to anything else, perhaps, that we owe the varie- 
ties in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, on which 
the happiness of man and the progress of the world so 
much depend. Under this law, if it is a law, and not 
the result of a direct divine interference, the species are 
continued intact in the vegetable and animal kingdoms; 
the proper lines between orders and species are never 
crossed; the great divisions between the different 
kingdoms are never confounded; but within these 
limits, endless varieties are introduced upon the earth, 
rendering it possible that there should be a constant 
advance in human things. What seems to be an acci- 
dent in the races of horses, sheep, cattle, by which one 
or more of a superior order, or of a different color or 
form, may be produced and propagated, becomes the 
foundation for the different breeds of horses, sheep, and 
cattle ; and to this fact, undoubtedly, is to be traced the 
origin of the different breeds of animals, and the fact 
that those of one generation may be so much more 
valuable than those of a former age. It is a well known 
fact, also, that in planting the seeds of apples, straw- 
berries, peaches, and other fruits, there is no certainty, 
nor indeed the smallest probability, that any considera- 
ble number of seeds will produce the same fruit as the 
parent. While there will be no crossing between the 
species; while the apple will produce an apple, the 
peach a peach, and the strawberry a strawberry, and 
nothing else, it is still true that none of them may be 
like the parent, and that no two of the same kind of 
seeds will produce the same kind of fruit. It is to this, 
as is well known, that we obtain from " seedlings' 11 that 



154 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

vast variety of fruit which we now possess ; and from 
this fact it occurs that there is a possibility of progress 
in the cultivation of fruit and grain. A strawberry, a 
peach, an apple, thus produced, may be far in advance 
in size and flavor of the parent, and, by becoming the 
parent of a new variety, may lay the foundation for 
permanent progress in horticulture or agriculture. The 
products of "seedlings," also, are capable of propa- 
gation. While it is true, as a general law, that the 
"hybrids," the "cross-breeds," and the "half-breeds," are 
less susceptible of propagation, and soon "run out;" and 
while it is true that the offsprings of different races of 
animals cannot propagate their kind, this is by no means 
true of the accidental varieties in the same species. Now 
it cannot be demonstrated that all the varieties in the 
human race may not have been produced under some 
such law ; or, in other words, that they may not be the 
result of an accidental variety, as difficult of explana- 
tion as the existence of a black sheep in a flock ; or a 
horse of peculiar color, beauty, or size ; or of a Devon, 
an Ayrshire, or a Durham variety among cattle; or of 
Hovey's Seedling, the Moyamensing Pine, the Mc- 
Avoy's Superior, the British Queen, or the Early 
Scarlet, among strawberries ; or of the Early Harvest, 
the Summer Pearmain, the Maiden's Blush, the Haw- 
thornden, the Eambo, the Fall Pippin, the Bell-flower, 
the Greening, or the Spitzenberg, among apples ; or of 
the Carnation, the Elton, the Kentish, the Late Duke, 
the May Duke, the Morello, or the White Heart, among 
cherries; or of the Bloodgood, the Julienne, the Tyson, 
the Moyamensing, the Washington, the Bartlett, the 
Marie Louise, the Duchesse dAngouleme, the Chau- 
montel, or the Seckel, among pears. All these, and 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 155 

numerous other varieties, are to be traced to the same 
cause: at first to "accident," and then to culture and 
propagation. No man can demonstrate that the varieties 
in the human species may not have been produced 
under some such law, by an origin which can no more 
be accounted for than the origin of the Catawba Grape, 
the Moorpark Apricot, or the Rare-Ripe Peach. It is 
not affirmed that this is the origin of the different 
races of men ; it is affirmed only that the man who 
maintains that all the varieties of the human race have 
not descended from one pair must demonstrate that a 
law which prevails so extensively in regard to animals 
and plants, and which is the foundation of the vast 
variety existing in those kingdoms — a variety apparently 
as great as those which are found in the human species — 
could not have had an existence in the propagation of 
man. The presumption from analogy would seem to 
be that this was at least probable; the contrary can 
never be demonstrated. 

(3) It is necessary for those who assert that the 
diversities of the human race cannot be accounted for 
philosophically on either of the two suppositions which 
have been referred to, to demonstrate that it cannot 
have been caused by some direct divine interposition, 
by which, for some cause not now known to us, such 
a change may have been produced in the constitution 
of certain portions of the race as to lay the foundation 
for the diversities which now exist. That God has 
had, and still has, the power to do this, no one can deny; 
and whether he ever has thus interposed in relation to 
man, or to any other creatures upon the earth, is a 
question to be examined, and which is a fair subject of 
inquiry. A rejecter of revelation has not the right to 



156 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

assume that this could not be; for changes have occurred 
on the earth certainly not less remarkable, or less dim- 
cult of explanation, than this would be. A great change 
of belief has already commenced, and will be likely to 
extend much farther than it has yet done, in regard 
to the divine interposition in the affairs of the earth. 
Formerly the whole doctrine of miracles was denied, 
and the denial was attempted to be maintained on the 
ground of science. It was held to be unphilosophical 
to suppose that God would interpose in any such way 
as to change, or, as it was expressed, { to violate' the 
laws of nature; and Mr. Hume endeavored to demon- 
strate that it was impossible to be proved by human 
testimony that any such changes have occurred. One 
of the great revolutions produced by the disclosures of 
geology consists in the fact that God is again intro- 
duced into his own world, and in the demonstration 
of the fact, that he has, from time to time, interposed 
in the affairs of the earth by a succession of most re- 
markable miracles — that is, by producing changes which 
cannot be traced to any secondary antecedent causes, or 
to the operation of mere physical laws. It is now esta- 
blished by the disclosures of geology that there has 
been on the earth a succession of races of animals, a 
large part of which have passed away, and that these 
successive races came upon the earth, not by develop- 
ment from some anterior and inferior race, but by a 
beginning — a springing into existence anew — a creation 
— and therefore a miracle. No conclusion of geology 
is more clear and well defined than this, that those 
races are distinct from each other ; that one is not a 
development from a preceding race; that they have 
begun to be, and that having accomplished their pur- 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 157 

pose, they have passed away to give place to a new 
race or order of higher character, and better adapted 
to the new condition of the world, until at last man 
appeared, not as a development from an inferior race, 
but as a new form of being. Now, these new and 
successive races of animals must either have been the 
production of physical laws, or must have sprung up 
by " spontaneous generation," or must have been deve- 
loped from an inferior race, or must have been brought 
upon the stage by direct creative power. The science 
of geology, left to itself, has set aside each of the for- 
mer of these suppositions, and has disclosed to the 
world the fact that there have been successive crea- 
tions upon the earth, occupying vast periods of dura- 
tion, perhaps millions of years, until the whole was 
crowned by the creation of man; and that, so far from 
its being true that miracles are impossible, nothing has 
been more common on the earth. God has been con- 
tinually interposing by miraculous creative power. 
Each new order of beings that has been introduced 
into the world, has been brought upon the stage by a 
miracle; each new act of creation has been a miracle; 
and whatever may have been, in the estimation of 
Mr. Hume, the insufficiency of " human testimony," 
in establishing a miracle, no one can doubt now the 
"testimony" of geology, as found in the fossil re- 
mains of the extinct generations of beings scattered 
over the earth, each followed by a new creation, that 
there have been interventions of Divine power above 
that of any existing "laws of nature," in producing 
momentous changes in the affairs of our world ; that is, 
that miracles " have been matters of quite common oc- 
currence," for every act of creation must be a miracle. 



158 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

It is not, therefore, an opinion which should be set 
aside as unworthy of attention, that God may have in- 
terposed at some period, or periods, in the affairs of 
men, in producing changes in the human condition 
which would account for all the diversities now found 
among the races of men upon the earth. 

The remark which I have been now making is, that 
we have a right to demand that he who denies the 
truth of the Scripture statement that the race is made 
of one blood, and is descended from one pair, should 
be able to set aside each of these suppositions, before 
he can philosophically reject the testimony of the Bible 
on the subject. If either of these suppositions will ac- 
count for the varieties in the human race, or, if either of 
them may have occurred — that is, if it is impossible to 
demonstrate that they could not have occurred, then 
it is not unphilosophical to receive the testimony of the 
Bible in the case as true. 

The opinion of the writer of this Essay would be of 
no value as to the question which of these three suppo- 
sitions is most philosophical, and which will ultimately 
be found to be true ; but I may be permitted to submit 
the inquiry whether the second of those suggested, and 
which has not been commonly referred to in endeavor- 
ing to account for the diversities of the race, will not 
be found to be most in accordance with the analogies 
of nature. The believer in the Bible must suppose 
that the solution is to be found in one of them, and he 
may be held to the responsibility of showing that one 
of them is probable and philosophical. It is indis- 
pensable for the rejecter of revelation to show that 
neither of them can possibly be true. 



IN" THE WORD OF GOD. 159 



CHAPTER IV. 

CONCLUSION. WHAT IS THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH IN 
THE WORD OF GOD. 

The conclusioDS which have been reached in this 
Essay, if the reasoning which has been pursued is 
sound, are the following: — 

(1) That there is in the nature of things such a thing 
as truth — as right and wrong; such a thing as justice, 
benevolence, holiness, in themselves considered, and 
without reference to any power ordaining them to be 
such. God is holy, not simply because he is what he 
is, and because he chooses to call this holiness, or 
because he requires his creatures to believe that what 
he chooses to be constitutes holiness, but because there 
is such a thing as holiness in itself, and because that 
holiness is found in him. The opposite of this would 
not be holiness, even if found in God, and if he chose 
to require that it should be regarded as holiness. So 
God is true; God is just; God is good, not simply 
because certain attributes exist in him and he choose 
to call those attributes truth, justice, and goodness, but 
because there is such a thing as truth, justice, goodness 
in the nature of things, and because these things are 
found in fact in the essential nature of God. The 
opposite of these things would not be truth, justice, 



160 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

goodness, even if found in God, and even if he should 
solemnly require that they should be regarded as such. 
God is thus worthy of adoration, confidence, love, not 
because he has chosen to possess certain attributes and 
to call them holiness, truth, justice, and goodness, but 
because his nature is, in fact, and apart from any 
arbitrary appointment, holy, true, just, and good. His 
nature is perfect, not simply because it is what it is, 
and he choose to call it perfection because it is his, but 
because there is such, a thing as a perfect character ; 
and that character is found in him. Any supposable 
change of his nature; any act by which he would 
become different from what he is, would not make that 
new nature perfect or holy because it was his, and 
because he chose that it should be regarded as perfect ; 
but if he became what we now regard as unjust, 
untrue, and malevolent, it tuould be injustice, falsehood, 
and malevolence still, though it were found in him. 
We adore, love, and reverence God not because he has 
made one thing true and another false, and required us 
to regard it as such because he has so made them, but 
because he is holy, just, good, and true, and is, in fact, 
worthy of universal adoration and praise. The founda- 
tion of our faith in him is that he is a perfect Being ; 
not that he is an arbitrary Being, a Being of mere 
power, that can " call evil good or good evil," and thus 
require his creatures to adopt a shifting morality at 
his pleasure. 

(2) The nature of God is such that it, in fact, cor- 
responds with that which is eternally true, good, just, 
and right, or that it represents that and measures that. 
His character, his laws, his plans, always correspond 
with, and represent that which is eternally right. 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 161 

Knowing what his character is, or what his will is, we 
know what is right and what is wrong ; for he ex- 
presses and represents that in his whole nature and in 
all his laws. We need no other standard of right and 
wrong, of truth and error, therefore, than his will, for 
that will corresponds with what is eternally right and 
just; we are sure that, when we understand his nature 
and his will, we understand what is eternally just, true, 
and good. Thus his character and his will become the 
exponent or measure of what is just and true, not 
because he makes one thing to be true and another 
false, one thing good and another evil, by an act of 
will, but because such is the perfection of his nature 
that it cannot be otherwise than that it should repre- 
sent and express what is best. Man is so made that, 
when his mind acts freely and under right influences, 
he regards his Maker as perfect. God designed, in 
forming the human soul, that it should be so made as 
to attribute perfection to its Creator, and to have con- 
fidence in him as a perfect Being. The soul of man 
was so made by a clear purpose on the part of the 
Creator, and the skill and wisdom of the Creator have 
been eminently shown in making it thus. 

In accordance with this view, we are led to believe 
that the universe is made with the highest wisdom 
and goodness. It is not merely formed in a certain 
way, and pronounced to be good and wise because it is 
the mere pleasure of God that it should be so regarded, 
and because he chooses that what he has done should 
be regarded as wise and good, but it is made as it 
would be on the supposition that it was intended to 
make a world that should develop what is wise and 
good. The human frame is made in the best manner 



162 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

for the ends contemplated, not because it is made in a 
certain way and then pronounced to be made in the 
best manner, or because God requires us to believe 
that what he does is best simply because he chooses to 
call it so, but because it is wisely and skilfully made. 
It is made as one would make it who should undertake 
to adapt it perfectly to the ends in view. So in the 
vegetable kingdoms; so in the mineral kingdoms ; so 
in the air, the water, the land ; so in the universe of 
stars and suns. The whole framework of nature is 
thus wisely fitted up ; and the proper result of the 
study of the works of God is not merely to learn what 
he has done, and then to call that wisdom and goodness 
because he has chosen to call it so, but to learn through 
those works that God is wise, and great, and good, 
and just. The universe is made just as it would be 
made by a Being of infinite wisdom, goodness, and, 
therefore, it is made in the best manner possible. God 
is to be adored and loved, not because he made a uni- 
verse without any regard to what was wise and best, 
and then chose that we should regard what he had 
done as wise and best; but he is to be adored and 
loved because he has done all things in conformity 
with the most perfect idea of what is wise and best, 
and he is, therefore, a Being who is worthy of uni- 
versal confidence and love. 

Hence men 'study nature;' learning from nature 
not merely what God does, but what is best. They find 
there not only the wisest arrangements, but the wisest 
models for them to imitate. Most of the mechanical 
contrivances among men are mere imitations of nature, 
because God has done there what it is best and wisest to 
be done. He understood the case perfectly, and he 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 163 

adapted bis arrangements to what is wisest and best. 
In the mechanic arts; in the structure of ships, houses, 
bridges, arches; in relation to the power of the lever, 
the screw, the inclined plane — to lifting weights, and to 
locomotion — men are learning more and more to aban- 
don their own models and to study those of nature; and 
in these explorations of nature, men are rapidly coming 
to the conclusion that in reference to any object which 
they may desire to accomplish, they may find some- 
where in nature a more perfect model than they can 
themselves devise, and that all that they can hope to 
do is to approximate it in some humble degree, but 
with no hope of being able to form one as perfect 
themselves. The most perfect models for ships, for 
example, are found in nature, and the perfection of 
naval architecture is closely connected with an ac- 
quaintance with the form and structure of the fishes 
and fowls whose home is the water, and which are 
made to glide safely on the water or swiftly through it. 
Geology, while it has seemed to endanger revelation, 
has also contributed much to a correct knowledge of 
God, and of his truth. Among other things, it has 
shown how accurately the principle now referred to 
was consulted even in the structure of those animals 
that have now passed away, for even in what are now 
regarded as the humblest forms of animal life — forms 
of life of so little consequence in the great scale of 
being that they have been suffered forever to pass 
away — proofs of skill are found such as now enter into 
the highest mechanical contrivances. God made things 
good not by an arbitrary decree, or, in other words, they 
were not good because he simply made them, but made 
them as perfect as they could be, according to the best 



164 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

idea of what was demanded in the circumstances. The 
most ingenious contrivances of men have been in nu- 
merous cases anticipated, and are but a " repetition of 
a previously executed design." " The partitions," for 
example, "which separate into chambers all the whorls 
of the ammonite except the outermost one, were ex- 
quisitely adapted to strengthen, by the tortuous wind- 
ings of their outer edges, a shell which had to combine 
great lightness with great powers of resistance. Itself 
a continuous arch throughout, it was supported by a 
series of arches inside, somewhat resembling in form 
the groined ribs of the Gothic roof, but which, unlike 
the ponderous stonework of the mediaeval architects, 
were as light as they were strong. And to this com- 
bination of arches there was added, in the ribs and 
grooves of the cell, yet another element of strength 
— that which has of late been introduced into iron 
roofs, which, by means of their corrugations — ribs and 
grooves like those of the ammonite — are made to span 
over wide spaces, without the support of beams or 
rafters. Still more recently the same principle has 
been introduced into metallic boats, which, when cor- 
rugated, like the old ammonites, are found to be suffi- 
ciently strong to resist almost any degree of pressure 
without the wonted addition of an exterior framework. 
The belemnite seems to have united the principle of 
the float to that of the sinker, as we see both of them 
united in some of our modern life-boats, which are 
preserved on their keel by one principle, and preserved 
from foundering by another. The trilobites were 
covered over back and head with the most exquisitely 
constructed plate armor ; but as their abdomens seem 
to have been soft and defenceless, they had the ability 



IN THE WORD OF GOD, 165 

of coiling themselves round on the approach of danger, 
plate moving on plate with the nicest adjustment, till 
the rim of the armed tail rested on that of the armed 
head, and the creature presented the appearance of a 
ball defended at every point. Nor were the ancient 
crinoids less remarkable for the amount of nice con- 
trivance which their structures exhibited, than the 
ancient molluscs or crustaceans. In their calyx-like 
bodies, consisting always of many parts, we find the 
principle of the arch introduced in almost every possi- 
ble form and modification, and the utmost flexibility 
secured to their stony arms by the amazing number 
of the pieces of which they were composed, and the 
nice disposition of the joints. The bony scales which 
covered fishes such as the Osteolepis and Diplopterus 
of the Old Eed Sandstone, were of considerable mass 
and thickness. They could not, compatibly with much 
nicety of finish, be laid over each other, like the thin 
horny scales of the salmon or herring ; and so we find 
them curiously fitted together, not like slates on a 
modern roof, but like hewn stones on an ancient one. 
There ran on the upper surface of each, along the an- 
terior side and higher end, a groove of a depth equal 
to half the thickness of the scale; and along the pos- 
terior side and lower end, on the under surface, a sort 
of bevelled chamber, which, fitting into the grooves of 
the scales immediately behind and beneath it, brought 
their surfaces to the same line, and rendered the shin- 
ing coverings of these strongly armed ganoids as 
smooth and even as those of the most delicately coated 
fishes of the present fay?— Testimony of the Rocks. 
By Hugh Miller, pp. 241-247. 

The world is full of contrivances of this sort, tend- 
12 



166 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

ing to illustrate the idea that the Great Creator is a 
Being of infinite wisdom and goodness, and that things 
are made in accordance with what is in itself wise and 
good. There is nothing arbitrary in those works. 
The arrangements are resorted to not as a matter of 
mere will % but because it is best that they should be re- 
sorted to. 

The idea here suggested, and which it has been the 
object of this Essay to illustrate, is, that the nature of 
God is such that his character is perfectly conformed 
to what i's right and best. In all things his will is 
best, not simply because it is his will, but because it is 
in itself best, and because such is his nature that what 
He does is always conformed to that. 

Thus, we have confidence in God : not as a Being of 
mere power*, not as one who does what he pleases and 
then ordains that what he does is best, simply because 
he wills it ; not as one who might have willed or done 
the opposite of what he has willed and done, and who 
then, with equal ease, could have made that right by 
an act of will ; not as one who calls one thing evil and 
another good because he chooses to do so, and who 
might have reversed the arrangement if he had chosen 
to do it ; not as one who has made us simply to ap- 
prove of what he has done, and who could have made 
us to have approved the reverse if he had chosen to do 
so ; not as one who has shaped the conscience merely 
to approve of what he does, irrespective of the question 
whether it is right or wrong, and who might, if he had 
chosen, have so made the conscience as to approve of 
what it now condemns, and to feel pain at what now 
gives it pleasure. Not for reasons such as these have we 
confidence in God, and not for reasons such as these 
are we required to have confidence in him, but his 



TN THE WORD OF GOD. 167 

nature is worthy of confidence, because he is good, and 
true, and holy ; because his will is always conformed 
to what is just and right; because he has so made us 
that we can be virtuous after his own image, that we 
can approve of what is right in itself, that we can be 
prompted by our conscience to what is in itself good, 
that we can be deterred from what is evil because a 
certain course is evil, that we can be led in a path 
which is straight and right because it is straight and 
right. In one word, God is not an arbitrary being, 
sporting with right and wrong; giving arbitrary names 
to things ; exalting things indifferent into virtues, or 
making things that are harmless, vices ; making things 
good or evil at his will ; establishing by mere will a 
temporary and flexible morality : he is a Being all 
whose words, and laws, and commands, and acts are 
conformed to what is eternally and unchangeably 
right. It is only in such a Being that we can have 
confidence ; only under the government of such a God 
that the interests of the universe can be secure. Know- 
ing, if we can in any way, what is true and right, we 
know what God will do and ordain ; knowing, in any 
way, what he does, and what he ordains, we know that 
that is right, for his nature is such that that result will 
always be secured. The foundation of our confidence, 
then, in God is that his nature is absolutely perfect ; 
that it is conformed to what is eternally true, and just, 
and good, and holy, and best. 

(3) The foundation of faith in his word, therefore, is, 
that that word is the expression of what he sees to be 
true and right, and that, therefore, it is worthy of our 
confidence in the same way that he himself is. It is 
based on evidence that it is indeed his word, and though 
in all cases we may not be able to see its reasonableness 



168 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

— as we cannot in all cases see the reason of his doings — 
yet we feel assured that his word has a foundation in 
the truth itself, as his doings have a foundation in wis- 
dom. In neither case do we contemplate a mere 
utterance of will, but we contemplate what we are 
made to regard as wisdom and truth. The faith which 
we have in his word is faith in himself, and resolves 
itself ultimately into that. It is a confident belief that 
what he reveals is in accordance with what is eternally 
true and right. If it be supposed that he would make 
a revelation at all, he could communicate as truth no- 
thing else than what he has communicated. He could 
not, by an act of will, have made to be true the reverse 
of those things which he has now revealed as true, nor 
could he have made those things to be right which 
would be the reverse of what he has now commanded. 
As he could not have made two and two seven, or the 
three angles of a triangle more than two right angles, 
so he could not have made ingratitude, pride, selfish- 
ness, dishonesty, fraud, oppression, cruelty, slavery, 
right. There are eternal principles of truth and jus- 
tice. He has made us to approve of those principles, 
and to disapprove of the opposite ; and he has made 
us to love and reverence him because all his acts and 
laws are conformable to those principles. We could 
not approve the conduct or love the character of a 
God whose revealed word was not conformed to these 
eternal principles. 

(4) In those matters, which lie level to our compre- 
hension, or within the limits of our present faculties, 
his revealed truth commends itself to our understand- 
ings and our consciences, in such a way that we perceive 
it to be true. We might not have been able to discover 
it ourselves. The human mind might never have come 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 169 

up to it in its onward progress. But when it is re- 
vealed, it commends itself as true, and we receive it as 
such. We see that it accords with all our convictions 
of truth; with all the principles of our nature ; with all 
the demands of our moral aud intellectual being ; with 
all the circumstances of our condition ; with all our 
constitutional desires and aspirations. The doctrines 
which he has revealed commend themselves to us in 
such a sense that the opposite could not be made to 
commend themselves to us, or so that we could not 
find in our being that which would approve of the 
opposite of these things as true. As no revelation 
could so present the proposition that all the angles of 
a triangle are greater than two right angles that we 
could receive it as true, so there are propositions in 
morals and religion which could not be so commended 
to us by any pretended revelation that we could pos- 
sibly receive them as true. They would be false to 
our nature ; false to our instincts ; false to our hopes ; 
false to our experience ; false to the whole course of 
things on earth. We could not, by any authority of a 
pretended revelation, be made to embrace the proposi- 
tion that intemperance is a virtue, for the whole course 
of things is against such a proposition. No virtue 
could lead to such results as intemperance does. We 
could not, by any pretended revelation, be made to be- 
lieve that ingratitude, falsehood, treachery, dishonesty, 
theft, oppression, are virtues; for all the instincts of 
our nature, all the laws of our being, all the results of 
conduct, demonstrate to us that such things cannot be 
virtues. But we can believe, we do easily believe, that 
the conduct recommended in the golden rule is vir- 
tuous ; for, although we might not have been able to 

12* 



170 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

originate that rale ourselves, it so commends itself to 
us when it is revealed that we see at once that it is 
right and good. The same is true of the requirements 
of honesty, fidelity, kindness, benevolence, charity, and 
chastity. The same is true of the law which requires 
us to pray, to love God, to keep his law, to lead a 
serious life, to prepare for another world. Nothing 
could convince the world at large that theft and piracy 
are right; nothing can convince the world at large 
that slavery is right ; and if in a book of pretended 
revelation these things were sanctioned as right, or 
enjoined as just, the book would ultimately be rejected 
by mankind. Man could not be convinced that such 
a book came from God — for such doctrines are opposed 
to the constitution of our nature, and they cannot be 
embraced by the world as right. 

It is the fact now adverted to which is the founda- 
tion of the strong attachment of Christians to the truths 
of the Bible. They see the statements in the Bible to 
be true. These statements accord with all the demands 
of their nature ; with all the wants of their condition ; 
with all their own experience ; with all the circum- 
stances of their being. Nothing can convince them 
that the religion which reveals such truths is false. 
They may not be able to demonstrate, so as to meet 
the cavils of objectors, that the miracles alleged to 
have been wrought, were wrought ; they may not be 
qualified to enter into the learned questions which arise 
in regard to the criticism of the sacred books ; they 
may be unable to meet many of the sneers and cavils 
of infidels ; but they are assured that the truths in 
the Bible accord with the wants of their nature, and 
are such as it is proper that a revelation should com- 
municate to mankind. They are so made that they 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 171 

cannot believe those statements to be false. No terror 
of the flames of martyrdom can convince them that 
they are not true. Euclid could never have been con- 
vinced that two rectangles, which have the same alti- 
tude, are not to each other as their bases ; Pythagoras 
could never have been convinced that in a right-angled 
triangle the square of the hypothenuse is not equal to 
the sum of the squares of the two sides; and Galileo, 
with all his submission to the authority of the church, 
never was convinced that the Copernican system of 
astronomy is not the true system. No fury of perse- 
cution ; no terrors of the rack, the thumb-screw, the 
fagot, ever could have convinced those men that they 
did not hold the truth on those subjects. In like 
manner, no terror of the rack or the stake can convince 
a Christian that he has not by nature a sinful heart; 
that he is not bound to love God ; that the law of God 
is not such as his conscience and reason approve ; that 
the plan of salvation is not adapted to his wants as a 
sinner, as a dying man, and as a traveller to another 
world. Nothing can convince him that the require- 
ments of the Gospel are not adapted to promote his 
own purity, peace, and happiness, or that that Gospel 
would not put a period to the evils that now reign 
upon the earth. The Gospel commends itself to his 
nature ; it meets his wants ; it satisfies his soul ; it fills 
him with peace ; it sustains him in trial ; it aids him 
in the hour of temptation ; it inspires him with hope ; 
it elevates his character, and imparts to him a joy 
which he has sought in vain in the pleasures and pur- 
suits of the world. He may not be able to ' argue' for 
these truths, but he can 'burn' for them; and hence 
thousands and tens of thousands of Christians, many 
of them 'unlearned and ignorant' — many of them 



172 THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH 

trained in the refinements of elevated life — many of 
them tender and delicate females — have gone cheer- 
fully to the stake in attestation of their faith in the 
Eedeemer. 

(5) In matters which lie beyond the limits of our 
reason, the precepts of a true revelation will be in the 
range of truths already known, and will commend 
themselves to us as such. We have the same confi- 
dence in the disclosures of the telescope which we 
have in those which are made by the naked eye. We 
as really believe in the existence of Uranus or Nep- 
tune ; in the existence of stars in the various nebulae ; 
and in the existence of the asteroids between Mars 
and Jupiter, as we do in the sun or the moon. The foun- 
dation of faith is the same; and a man will as certainly 
and confidently act on the belief of the one as the 
other. So in regard to the truths of revelation. Many 
of those truths could never have been discovered by 
the unaided reason of man. But they lie in the range 
of truths already known, and none of them are con- 
tradictory to truths with which we are familiar, and 
on which we act from day to day. The instrument 
by which they are communicated to us makes no dif- 
ference in regard to the foundation or .the strength of 
our faith, any more than the fact that one object is 
made known to us by the naked eye and another by 
the telescope makes a difference in the foundation of 
our faith in natural things. The foundation of faith 
in either case is simply that what is believed is true. 
It matters not how the truth in the case is communi- 
cated to the mind; the fact that it is true is that on 
which the mind relies. In the cases just supposed, we 
rely in one iustance on the testimony of the naked 
eye, in another on the testimony of the telescope ; in 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 173 

either case, on our conviction that what is believed is 
true. In matters pertaining to God; to the atonement; 
to the resurrection of the dead; to the realities of an- 
other world, we rest on the conviction of our own reason 
and conscience as far as they will carry us, and then on 
the testimony of God in matters above our reason : in 
either case on the belief that what is embraced by the 
mind is true. Our faith then in those things which lie 
beyond the limits of our own immediate observation is 
of the same nature, and is as firm, as in respect to 
those things which are within the range of our unaided 
powers, as faith in the revelations of the telescope is 
of the same nature as faith in the disclosures made by 
the naked eye. 

(6) From the nature of the case, and from the re- 
sults of all the progress that man has made thus far 
in science, the friend of the Bible may and should 
believe that all the disclosures yet to be made in sci- 
ence will be in accordance with the teachings of that 
book. As the teachings of the Bible commend them- 
selves to our reason; to the instincts of our nature; 
to all just conceptions of right and wrong; to the 
eternal doctrines of truth ; to all our wants and to all 
our hopes — as they accord with what science has dis- 
closed thus far, and as the results have shown that 
there may be just confidence in the Bible so far as 
the knowledge of man has gone, the friend of the 
Bible is justified in supposing that it will always be 
so. The Bible, in its moral teachings, has commended 
itself to mankind as being in accordance with the 
principles of eternal truth and justice; it has kept in 
advance on the subject of morals of all that man could 
discover from other sources, and is still in advance; 
science has not yet disclosed anything that has been 



174 THE FOUNDATION OF FATTIT 

demonstrated to be contradictory to the statements of 
the Bible; the results of all the discoveries made 
have been only to extend the conviction in the world 
that the Bible is true, and as the Bible occupies this 
position in an age of the world such as this is, it can- 
not be regarded as an unjustifiable anticipation that 
it will always occupy a similar position. The believer 
in the Bible has nothing to fear. The just foundation 
of faith in the word of God has not thus far been 
shaken. From this point, it seems to be proper that 
the believer in the book should look onward without 
apprehension of the future. The chemist will conduct 
his inquiries in accordance with the laws of his own 
science, and without reference to the questions of 
exegesis about the meaning of the Bible, or of any 
other book. Let him do it. Let him not be disturbed 
in his communion with retorts, and blowpipes, and 
crucibles, even though he should pursue his inquiries 
with the feelings of Mephistoplieles in Faust. — The 
miner will dig in the rocks, will turn up again the old 
foundations of the earth, and pursue his inquiries 
amidst the monuments of by-gone ages — the relics and 
memorials of extinct generations of animals — the 
monuments that tell of modes of being that have long 
since passed away, and that are now unknown — quite 
irrespective of any inquiry about what the Bible 
teaches respecting the age of the world. Let him do 
it. Let him not be disturbed as he wields his pick- 
axe, by any of the questions which interpreters of the 
Bible have raised about the meaning of the first chap- 
ter of Genesis. Thus far the result has shown that 
from such sources the friend of the Bible has nothing 
to fear. — The astronomer will point his glass to the 
heavens, and search for new stars, planets, comets, 



IN THE WORD OF GOD. 175 

asteroids; will endeavor to resolve the still unresolved 
nebulae, and to bring other nebulae into view, to be 
resolved in turn by some future explorer, and he will 
do all this with no reference as to what the Bible 
teaches on the subject of creation. Let him do it. 
Thus far the friend of the Bible has had nothing to 
fear from these discoveries, and he has no ground to 
apprehend the result of any disclosures which astro- 
nomy may have yet to make. — The antiquarian will 
brush the dust from ancient monuments, and seek to 
decipher the meaning of long-buried inscriptions on 
temples and tombs; and he will do this with no refer- 
ence to what the Bible teaches as to the antiquity of 
the human race. Let him do it. Thus far the friend 
of the Bible has seen no reason for apprehension as to 
the result of such inquiries. Champollion and Lepsius 
in Egypt, and Layard in Assyria, have done nothing 
to shake the confidence of the Christian in the Bible; 
and it is not an unfair anticipation that no future dis- 
closures from ancient tombs and temples will shake the 
foundation of faith in the word of God. And so the 
race will make progress in morals; in political science; 
in the refinements and courtesies of domestic and 
public intercourse; in the promptings of humanity; 
in the impulses of a generous benevolence ; in its 
views of what is proper in the dealings of man with 
man; in the claims to liberty as a right to be enjoyed 
by all men — but in none of these things will mankind 
ever get in advance of the teachings of the word of 
God. These teachings are in accordance with eternal 
truth; and the nearer the approximation which men 
make in any form of knowledge to the principles of 
eternal truth, the more will they appreciate and love 
the word of God. The farther they advance in that 



176 FOUNDATION OF FAITH IN THE WORD OF GOD. 

knowledge, also, the more will they venerate the cha- 
racter of God — for they will but perceive more clearly 
that that character is not arbitrary — is not changeable — 
is not founded on a mere purpose of will — but that it is 
in accordance with what is eternally true, and right, and 
wise, and good ; that he is to be adored because his 
nature is so perfect that all that he says and does will 
be in accordance with what is best, and will in all things 
be the exact measure of what is true and good. 

The sum of all — the result of all our inquiries is 
this: The foundation of faith in God and in his word 
is, that God IS infinitely wise, just, and good; not 
that he is an arbitrary Being, making evil good and 
good evil at his pleasure ; not as having the right to 
reverse these things if he should choose ; not as having 
the power of making that right which is now wrong, 
or that wrong which is now right — that true which is 
now false, or that false which is now true — that crooked 
which is now straight, or that straight which is now 
crooked — that benevolent which is now malignant, and 
that malignant which is now benevolent; but the 
foundation of confidence in God and his word is in 
the fact that there is an eternal distinction between 
right and wrong — that there are things that are right 
in themselves, and things that are wrong in them- 
selves — and that the character of God is so perfect 

THAT ALL THAT HE SAYS AND DOES IS, AND WILL EVER 
BE, IN ACCORDANCE WITH WHAT IS ETERNALLY TRUE, 



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